The law of hardware quantum indeterminancy.
Wednesday, 24 March 2010 at 12:12
If you just look at the outside of a piece of hardware you can't tell if it's working or not, but if you open the housing to peek inside you will unquestionably break it.NOVALUG presentation: Anonymity and Tor.
Wednesday, 24 March 2010 at 09:57
Confirmation's just hit the NOVALUG website - I will be presenting at the next meeting on 10 April 2010 on the topic of anonymity technologies in general and Tor in particular. Tor is the name of a free/open source utility which protects the user from traffic analysis and some content monitoring by passive attackers. I will discuss the origins of Tor as well as the threat model it was designed for, its capabilities, and potential attacks against the network as a whole and individual users thereof. I will also talk about operational security for users and Tor nodes. I will demonstrate how to set up Tor for use as a client as well as a Tor node as well as talk a little about potential threats incurred for both. I'll also demonstrate how to set up a hidden service using Tor and a simple web server and cap the presentation off with a Q&A session.The NOVALUG meeting will be held at the Herndon Library in northern Virginia starting around 1000 EST5EDT.
I hope to see everyone there.
Peter Watts: Aftermath
Tuesday, 23 March 2010 at 08:11
It seems that Squidgate has finally drawn to a close and now all that remains is to pack the pieces back into their respective slots, fold up the game board, and find out what sentence will be given to Dr. Watts. As has been repeated time and again around the Net (with varying signal/noise ratios), he was convicted of obstructing US border guards. Not attacking or making any threatening movements toward them, as the agents originally claimed. Obstructing them. The jury eventually decided in favor of the prosecution because, by the letter of the law (good luck finding it in there (thanks for the link, letscallhimray)), asking an officer why they are doing something constitutes obstruction, and is a felony punishable by up to two years in prison. Think about that for a moment. Someone starts going through your car without asking your consent, you ask them "What are you doing?", and you get slapped in cuffs (roughing up optional, getting nailed with a stunner costs extra) for doing so. That's all it takes.Dr. Watts' followup post is quite illuminating. A few of the jurors assigned to his case have come forward and it seems as if a common sentiment is that they could only reasonably act within the confines of their instructions (given to them by the judge) and the law, even though they may have disagreed with the spirit of the law. The newspaper local to the jurisdiction in which the trial was held is sticking to its guns, proven inaccuracies and all, but at this point it's all water under the bridge. As for the 'HABITUAL' flag attached to the verdict... it's safe to say that we're not going to find that out until after sentencing. Dr. Watts can't or won't discuss it but he says that he doesn't have a criminal record in Canada. I don't have the foggiest idea of how to go about probing that and I'm not sure I have time at the moment. One thing that stands out, however, is that searches of vehicles leaving the United States have been... not exactly normal, or even SOP, but apparently happen often enough that hackles are being raised. There are now signs posted where everyone can see them at the Canadian border (at least) warning of exit searches, caveat traveler.
It also says something about the quality of the surveillance systems in use at the Canadian border: they seem to still use videocassettes to store the recordings, the quality of the footage varies from grainy to pants, and the cameras are positioned such that a passing truck can obscure what's going on. Also, from what I can tell from the information available, there does not appear to be an audio track; if there is, no one has mentioned it. Somebody didn't do the math right when they worked out where to place those cams to effectively cover as much ground as possible. Unfortunately, it seems that word getting around on the Net may have acted against Dr. Watts because, people being people, overtures were probably made to Customs and Border Protection, the local jurisdiction, and many of them were probably ill-informed and incoherent if the history of similar fuckups is even halfway accurate. Ruffling official feathers in such a fashion is never, ever a good idea, possibly almost as bad an idea as not leaping when someone with a badge says "Jump!" and not asking "How high?" after the fact. That's not to say that getting the word out was entirely a bad thing - the donations that came from all corners which resulted from Cory Doctorow and Dr. Watts originally posting about this clusterfuck paid for his legal defense.
I don't mind telling you, I'm rather afraid of traveling right now. If an author from Canada can wind up getting stomped, arrested, and then convicted because he had the temerity to ask what was going on when a CBP officer violated protocol (which I suspect may be the first reaction of many people in such a situation)... well, I think the point stands, having been made by example. There is much more reason to fear the people on the border wearing badges who are ostensibly there to protect travelers than the remote possibility of a traveler up to no good. There does not seem to be any recourse other than the court system, and even then the deck's stacked against you. Between that and possibly having to turn all of my electronics over to someone following a procedure written by the lowest bidder for duplication, scrutiny, and possibly questioning, I don't want to go anywhere at all. There's no guarantee of arrival, after all.
Enterprise drive arrays.
Tuesday, 23 March 2010 at 07:08
Hot-swappable drives aren't.Peter Watts found guilty.
Friday, 19 March 2010 at 08:30
Quoted from here, referred to by Punkin 3.14159:FOUND GUILTY
JUDGMENT OF CONVICTION ENTERED
REFERRED TO PROBATION DEPT.
BOND IS CONTINUED; HABITUAL
2ND TO BE REVIEWED W/PROS.
Dammit.
EDIT: If you want to see it for yourself, here's how to do it (also from Punkin 3.14159):
Go here. Search on case ID 09-003320-FH. Click on 'Events' at the top, and scroll all the way down.
And what's up with the 'HABITUAL' flag on that file?
MySpace selling user data on the open market.
Thursday, 18 March 2010 at 19:31
MySpace, one of the biggest and best known social networking websites on the Net has announced that they'll be putting volumes of their users' data for sale on the open market. An outfit called Infochimps, which specializes in such bodies of data as stock market trading activity archives, political statistics, public service usage surveys, and social network data dumps will be handling the sales. The data will include such user generated content as playlists of music, posted photographs, blog posts, and users' stated locations. Some of the data dumps will even be organized by the (approximate) latitude and longitude of the users (not too difficult when you factor in the mobile app for MySpace). The data isn't being sold for any particular reason - you'd be surprised at how many people will analyze large volumes of data to see what patterns arise just for fun. Certainly, social science and new media researchers will take an interest in this data for their studies. Now, it shouldn't be all that surprising that people want to get their hands on this kind of information - a few researchers have been making use of the Google, Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace APIs for a while now to gather information. When you think about it a little it would be faster to just download the whole shebang all at once (and pay for the privilege of doing so) than it would to make several tens of thousands of HTTP requests over a period of hours or days.Everyone out there should keep a few things in mind: First, if you put it on the Net, chances are someone will see it at least once. The indexing spiders of search engines certainly will. Secondly, as a corollary to the first caveat, if you don't want something known, don't put it online. Anywhere. Thirdly, any data you put online is potentially valuable to someone regardless of how trivial or dumb it sounds. Pictures of your kids are of interest to marketers because they imply that you'll be in the market for children's consumables, toys, clothing, or other stuff. Links to the profiles and websites of your friends describe the sorts of people you communicate with and how often, judging by the conversations you post. The news sites and blogs you read are indicative of your interests, likes, dislikes, and general opinions on pretty much any topic. Fourth, if there's a way to make money off of something on the Net, you can bet dollars to doughnuts that someone will try it.
Peter Watts goes to trial.
Thursday, 18 March 2010 at 17:52
For those of you following the saga of Peter Watts, his trial began on Tuesday, 16 March 2010. I've been not posting about it to try to keep the signal-to-noise ratio as high as possible due to the rampant speculation, guesses couched as fact, and outright asshattery surrounding the case. What I will say is that Have Satellite Truck, Will Travel is covering the Watts trial directly - someone's not only on site but watching from the audience in the courtroom and posting updates as they come. It would appear that the trial itself actually took place on the sixteenth and seventeenth, and the case went to the jury earlier today. It seems that Watts' counsel got hold of the securicam footage from the border crossing and it's been entered into evidence for the defense. This afternoon, the jury asked to examine the recording on their own, for what it's worth. Watts' passenger (who was also told exactly what time it was by the guards) was also called to the stand to testify on his behalf. The three border guards who did the deed were also placed upon the stand to testify; not surprisingly, they all told exactly the same story (in uncannily the same way, if rumor is to be believed). We're all biting our nails over this one, Dr. Watts included.The jury will resume deliberations tomorrow morning.
We're all cheering for you, Dr. Watts.
Some mods good, some mods bad.
Thursday, 18 March 2010 at 16:36
It almost seems as if we're indoctrinated by North American culture to not enhance ourselves (the blizzards of spam to the contrary) in some way, shape, or form but still be told to do whatever we can to make sure that we get ahead. It's safe to say that we've grown up in a time when we can't remember hearing about at least one star athlete being suspended from a league because they tested positive for anabolic steroid use (be careful searching on that term, there are a couple of dodgy SEO sites in the top twenty) to build up muscle mass. It's a far cry from sayin' your prayers and eatin' your vitamins every morning, but it still always struck me as being a weirdly conflicted message. A couple of weeks back, H+ Magazine ran an article on just that debate - some enhancements are good and yet some are bad for arbitrary reasons. The aforementioned synthetic male hormones are right out, and yet it's possible to have laser eye surgery performed multiple times to gain a precision of vision that most of us can only dream of (average is 20/20, meaning that you can see something twenty feet away that the hypothetical average human eye can see at 20 feet). But that's okay.The hormone erythropoietin, secreted by the kidneys to regulate the number of red blood cells manufactured by bone marrow indirectly regulates how efficiently your muscles operate. A higher concentration of erythrocytes in the blood means that oxygen may be exchanged for carbon dioxide from the muscles more readily, leading to increased performance. Originally blood doping required autologous transfusions prepared weeks or months in advance but later the availability of synthetic erythropoietin meant that you didn't have to tap a vein to get an edge. Both practices are verboten in sports these days but lowering the concentration of oxygen in the air while you sleep (hypobaria) isn't. One guesses that this distinction comes from not wanting to penalize people who live at high elevations when they're not competing; a lower oxygen content in the air leads the body to produce larger amounts of the hormone. Even nootropic drugs are beginning to come under fire: several universities in the United Kingdom are beginning to consider whether or not they should start testing students for use of cognitive enhancement compounds to eke out a few more points on the curve but they're probably not yet cognizant of cognitive training techniques (which I maintain that they should start teaching in schools at a young age).
It's not easy to sort out what's going on. On one side of the bench, all of us are being pushed to excel at whatever it is that we do starting at a very young age. We're all urged to earn top marks in school so that we can get scholarships and go to the best schools. This drops off a bit in college but the current is still present. Grad school is no less than a trip through the underworld in which the rough bits of your psyche are ground away (or at least filed down) and even more information is packed into your head. Sports, like grad school, are a sink or swim proposition: play at the top of your form every time, all the time, or be forgotten as you sit on the bench. At some point everyone hits their limits; we all have them, whether or not we wish to admit it. Call it genetic potential, call it more neurons spontaneously dying in one region of the brain rather than another, call it one of the fifty-plus things that They say will massacre neurons en masse (from drinking alcohol to shaking your head too much (no, I'm not kidding (though you'll find dozens upon dozens of mirrors of that one page all over the place, which makes me mistrust it a little (more parenthesis than LISP! FTW!)))), call it having slightly less myoglobin in your muscles than the next lifeform in line... like it or not, enhancing drugs and techniques are what allow us to transcend those limitations inherent in our bodies. At some point the powers that be are going to have to make a decision: will methods to upgrade the body's functionality be allowed in $field_of_activity, will that field need to split to accommodate both the enhanced and the unenhanced (which seems likely to be a sports-related decision), or will They simply give up on trying to police how people train in their particular field and let the chips fall where they may?
Securityfocus.com to go away, subsumed into the Symantec borganism.
Tuesday, 16 March 2010 at 11:00
Back in 2002, the desktop security company Symantec bought out Securityfocus, which at the time was one of the biggest clearinghouses of information security related information. Everything from mailing lists to archives of whitepapers can be found there, and for many years it was pretty much the first place to go if you wanted to monitor vulnerability reports and software releases. After Symantec bought them out there was some concern that Securityfocus would decline in quality as time and energy might no longer be spent maintaining and updating the website. That didn't happen, thankfully, but last week the other shoe fell. Beginning yesterday the archives of Securityfocus started being folded into Symantec Connect, which is Symantec's community/portal/forum/archive site that more closely matches the Symantec brand. If you take a look around in there (which you don't need a subscription or login to get to, at least, not yet) there isn't a whole lot to work with yet. Of course, or at least for the moment, there is a lot of content which is Symantec and Windows specific; there appears to be a couple of blogs (like Securityresponse) which are showing some fairly recent information. It's going to take time to dig through their site and see what they have available and where it is. I expect that this will change as more and more old content is added to the Symantec Connect archives, and hopefully they'll set up redirects from the Securityfocus website.I just hope the mailing lists don't go away. A lot of good information gets posted to them.
Paul and Storm bring the Squid to Birchmere.
Saturday, 13 March 2010 at 13:22
Earlier this week while the usual suspects were at the Birchmere for Henry Rollins, I noticed that a couple of musicians that I wanted to hear, namely, Jonathan Coulton with Paul and Storm would be playing later this week. Unfortunately, inquiring at the theatre I found out that the show had been sold out for some time, but that I might have gotten lucky if someone would be selling their tickets. It was Lyssa and Mika who heard on the Net that someone locally was selling off his tickets to the show, and Mika jumped at the opportunity to pick them up. Long story short (for a change) we fumbled around a bit coordinating plans due to the rain (which means that people in DC suddenly develop temporary procedural amnesia), got stuck in traffic on the way there, and eventually met up outside of the Birchmere. Mika drove to the Birch right after work while Hasufin gave me a lift to the theatre because I wasn't sure that I was able to make it.Unfortunately, there were only two tickets, so it was just Mika and I last night. Dinner at the Birch isn't too bad - the food's a little expensive for a concert venue but you get what you pay for. Up first were Paul and Storm, half comedy duo, half geek folk singers, renowned for being one of the least sucky opening bands in existence (just ask them). They really are funny, I have to admit. In between their on stage banter and jokes about fictional cover bands that they've both started they regaled us with hilarious geek filk. They played such songs as Frogger: the Musical, Nun Fight (done as plainchant, of course), The Captain's Wife's Lament, and Opening Band (of course). It's safe to say that they kept us in stitches the whole time, from the moment that ten pairs of panties (and a pair of longjohns) arc'd onto the stage during their opening number to the back-and-forth that filled the spaces between songs (liminal comedy?)
After a short intermission spent in the restroom and admiring the autographed promo glossies hung in the hallways of the Birchmere (Steven Segal has a band? And they played there? Whoa.) the time came for the amusing and sometimes self-depricating Jonathan Coulton, whose claim to fame came from the Thing A Week Project, in which he went for the gusto by quitting his job as a programmer and publishing one song a week on the Net under the Creative Commons by-attribution/non-commercial/unported v3.0 license in an attempt to make it big. It seems that it worked, because Coulton is now making his living full-time as a geek troubadour. JoCo has a knack for hitting geeks squarely in between the eyes with songs like Code Monkey, Shop Vac, Mister Fancy Pants (which is really an excuse to jam on a Zendrum), and The Future Soon (which hit kinda close to home, I have to admit). While Paul and Storm go for comedy, JoCo tends to focus on the gawky, nervous side of geekdom. It's always heartening to know that there are other misfits out there, but Coulton really knows how to get the point across about such things as being painfully shy. Paul and Storm came out to play and sing backup on a couple of songs, including The First of May. Unfortunately, the cake was a lie last night.
I don't think I've laughed so hard in a long while. If, by chance, any of you hear that JoCo will be playing a gig within, oh, thirty miles of where you live, drop everything and buy tickets. Sell a kidney if you have to. They all put on a good show and you they're well worth the time to see live.
Three hours in the chair and I'm back to where I started.
Friday, 12 March 2010 at 21:08
Please be advised that a noticeable taste of blood is not part of any test protocol but is an unintended side effect of the Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grid, which may, in semi-rare cases, emancipate dental fillings, crowns, tooth enamel, and teeth.
--GLaDOS, Portal
Last week, I went to the dentist for my six month cleaning and was treated to an unexpected, and rather unpleasant surprise. Remember that molar I broke a couple of years ago - you know, the one that I had filled, fractured, capped, had a root canal on and re-cappped? When I was getting checked out last week, I discovered that you could see a line of decay around, and actually through the gumline. As it turned out, the pulp cap underneath the prosthetic (which never quite went underneath the gumline the way it was supposed to) was leaking; it admitted bacteria, which promptly began munching away once more at the structure of that particular tooth. Because I'd had a root canal there are no nerves left to get inflamed, and thus let me know that anything was amiss. I'd made an appointment for today (yesterday, actually) to get it taken care of by my usual dentist.
Long story short, I was in the chair for about three hours on Friday afternoon. Dr. Hong cut away the old dental crown and drilled out the composite plastic post holding what is left of that molar together, a procedure which took a bit longer than expected. Once that was gone, he only had to vacuum out the nastiness that (in hindsight I'm glad) was hidden from view. I'm told that there was little more than a soupy mess of bacteria and organic waste in there, and that the drilling was merely a formality to polish away the exposed layer of affected material. What's worse, the cavity was now just above the bifurcation, where the roots separate from the body of the tooth. It wasn't clear if there was enough tooth remaining for there to be any structural integrity or if it was going to split in half some time in the future. The question came down to whether or not he should extract the tooth and prep the site for an implanted replacement or try to reconstruct what was left. All but out of energy and hope, I told him to remove it, thinking that I'd figure out a way to pay for the reconstruction later but Dr. Hong disagreed. More x-rays were taken.
Through some miracle, some moment of grace, or Someone Somewhere rolling a critical success on their attempt to hit a butterfly flapping its wings in the outskirts of Beijing, the x-rays showed that there is still a decent amount of structural mass left in that tooth not made up on polymer composite. I wound up back in the chair with my jaws jacked open while he patiently built the molar back up with successive layers of UV sensitive plastic. I now sport yet another nifty temporary crown until the replacement can be fabricated, sometime two weeks hence. At least installing the replacement will be the work of ten minutes and the surgical steel implements won't be required. After today, that's practically a walk in the park.
Of course, I've left out a lot of stuff to make this post flow better, such as the half hour it took to pry the old crown off after bisecting it. It seems that it was a bit too well attached for its own good and required significant elbow grease to dislodge. It would also seem that in the process of removing the old tooth the surrounding gum was pretty badly torn up because stopping the bleeding became an hour-long project. I'm pretty sure that was the reason for the considerable delay between pumping the gunk out and beginning the restoration process, as well as the multiple casts that had to be made. And the persistent taste of blood that's been distracting me all day (or maybe that's the epinephrine mixed into the lidocaine wearing off).
Last night: Henry Rollins at the Birchmere.
Wednesday, 10 March 2010 at 17:01
I don't remember exactly who it was that got me into Henry Rollins' spoken word stuff. It might have been Mika, who gave me a two disc set for a long drive a couple of years ago. It might have been Lyssa, who tends to follow literature of all kinds. It might have been a couple of episodes of his television show on IFC that I caught online once. Hell, for all I know I've had those CDs since undergrad and I completely forgot about them. It's happened before. What I do know is that when Mika told us that Rollins would be in town on his (300+ location) world tour, we jumped at the opportunity and kept last night open on our calendar come hell or high water.After a few missteps after I got home from work, Lyssa and I hit up Whole Paycheque for a quick dinner which we'd unfortunately mistimed. Normally their hotbar's pretty good but if you get there just after everyone else in the city stops in on their way home from work some of the fare is... a bit dodgy, to be honest. From there we headed over to to Hasufin and Mika's place, where we parked the TARDIS on a side road, piled into their SUV, and hit the road for the Birchmere Music Hall in Alexandria, which is something of a fixture in NOVA.
You know, I really don't understand why they have a "no photography" policy at the Birchmere. Amanda Palmer spoke about that before her last show in DC, and she's got a point. There isn't a whole lot to see there, it isn't as if the background of the stage is a big artistic endeavour that people pay through the sinuses to look at. People pay to go to shows of some kind, and often you don't even know about the background. Their backdrop looks pretty much like the generic backdrop you see on standup comedy shows on cable television: a painting of what looks like the rear of a restaurant or club, with some stairs going down, a few windows looking into nothing, and a lamppost. There isn't a whole lot to it.
There. Now you know. Moving on...
More under the cut...
Just keep telling yourself: apply Hanlon's Razor first.
Monday, 08 March 2010 at 19:33
The saga of Dr. Peter Watts continues. He's crossed the US border a couple of times for hearings since his arrest in December of 2009, ostensibly for attacking a US border guard while trying to return to Canada. It's a given that he's going to go up on trial for real. However, it appears that he is now considered a fugitive from the law because he failed to show up in court on Friday, 5 March 2009. It is standard operating procedure that the defense and counsel are informed of their court dates in advance, but this time it seems they were not. Regardless of the origin of this fuckup, he's now considered to be on the run, arrest on sight, do not pass go, do not offer bail again. Dr. Watts' attorney is not available at this time because he's still on vacation.. after informing the court that he would be unavailable during their last appearance before the bench. Either somebody's trying to make an example of Dr. Watts or (more likely) somebody somewhere in the bureaucracy really screwed things up, but rarely is anyone called to account at times like these. Too messy and telling, you see.The really sad thing is that he'd barely found out that he had been left out of a pretty important loop before a couple of bloggers who've been watching the court dockets like a hawk found out about it. Maybe they've got timers rigged to follow updates to the page, who knows?
It's really not looking good, now.
Lower Merion quietly places two of their IT staff on leave.
Monday, 08 March 2010 at 19:16
I've been following the surreptitious webcam surveillance saga of Lower Merion School District since the story first broke in February, and some interesting news has come out of the Philadelphia area. It seems that two people on the school's IT staff have quietly been placed on paid leave as a result of the investigation. The school district is still clinging to their story that the webcams were remotely operated to aid in recovering stolen laptops, nevermind the fact that the camera can't actually see anything if the lid is closed. Plus, it's remotely possible at best to identify the location of a stolen laptop unless you can see a couple of landmarks out of a window that just happens to be there and not just someone's wall. The district has stated on the record that they'd activated webcams remotely forty-two times in the past year and a half whenever laptops were reported missing or stolen.Nevermind the fact that the parents of the student in question were sent copies of the pictures taken by his Macbook.
Time will tell. It'll be interesting to keep an eye on what happens when this case goes before a judge.
Biodegradable surgical implants and surreptitious DNA archival.
Thursday, 04 March 2010 at 15:58
After badly breaking a load-bearing part of your body it's not uncommon for an orthopedic surgeon to install a couple of after-market bits of hardware to hold the bones together while they knit. This usually takes the form of a couple of titanium alloy screws, though plates, rods, and tubes are not unknown. The downside of using something made out of metal to put things back together is that the screw holes left behind after the implants are removed require additional time to heal. Plus, the holes further compromise the structural integrity of the bone until they fill in. In the future this may be less of an issue - scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute of Bremen, Germany have figured out how to make surgical screws out of a biodegradable composite called hydroxylapatite. Hydroxylapatite, incidentally, comprises approximately one half of the composition of bone. Anyway, the idea is that the screws are installed during surgery and left in place rather than removed later. As the bone regenerates it grows around the bioactive components and incorporates them into its structure, thus hopefully reducing the risk that the bone will be stronger than it otherwise would be after healing.About a month ago I wrote an article about newborn children being tested for genetic diseases at birth and the possibility that the data might wind up in the hands of someone unexpected. It should come as no surprise that this has happened. The Texas Tribune discovered during the course of an investigation that approximately 800 samples were given to a military research program without anybody knowing about it. It turns out that the project is called AFDIL (Armed Forces DNA Identification Library) and was part of an effort to bootstrap a mitochondrial DNA database. There are a couple of things about mtDNA that should be kept in mind - it has only around 16,500 base pairs, which codes for 37 genes. There isn't a whole lot of room for variation there. Then again, there can be a lot of variation of mtDNA between tissues of the same person, let alone a group of people, so its use as an identification technique is questionable at best. The really worrisome thing is how far the powers that be went to keep this quiet, from settling out of court before the discovery phase of the lawsuit to various and sundry dodges and excuses to keep from having to get consent.
Senator of California busted in most embarassing DUI ever.
Thursday, 04 March 2010 at 15:18
There is a lot of breathlessly sensationalistic reporting about the arrest of Senator Roy Ashburn of California. Now, while my black little hearts oh so dearly want to leap up and down for joy at this turn of events, that's not the right thing to do. Let's face facts, here: he's been humiliated. He was thrown in jail but got out on $1400us bond (wow, that's cheap for DUI). His family and especially his children are probably taking this about as well as they would a pregnancy test that says they're about to have puppies. Chances are this could be the deciding factor over whether or not he gets recalled, which people have been trying to do in California for a while.Let's break it down: Senator Ashburn has a record of voting against LGBT-related bills that hit the Senate. He's divorced with four kids. The CHP arrested him around 0200 PST8PDT last night because he was swerving on the road after leaving a gay nightclub in Sacramento called Faces. A passenger in his car, who was male was not detained (and remains unidentified). Maybe his passenger fronted the cash to get him out; maybe not.
The statement he issued to the press is... okay. I'm trying not to act like an asshole here, but his statement is really not that different from other congressfolk, senators, and lawmakers who were anti-LGBT but later were outed as being gay, or at least bisexual over the years. Another one bites the dust.
Getting set back up after the move.
Wednesday, 03 March 2010 at 18:45
Things have been a bit dodgy over the past couple of days. I haven't written much because of stuff going on at home. Somehow, Leandra's systemware got horked along the way (I'm pretty sure that I messed up an upgrade somewhere along the line and it cascaded out of control) and I spent most of the weekend trying to fix it. While I think that I made some progress getting things put back together there is no guarantee that things aren't going to go seriously pear-shaped in the near future. Plus, I really don't have the bandwidth at home anymore to really host anything; one of the things I like least about my neighborhood is the generally crappy state of the telecom infrastructure here with no plans to run fibre out here for another couple of years, or so Verizon's schedule tells me. So, I got a Dreamhost contract and spent much of the night pushing everything out to their network and re-jiggering my DNS configuration.And so, here we are.
It might take me a couple of days to finish shaking the bugs out things, so I'm keeping an eye on everything, or when I have a chance to do so, anyway.
Now, to figure out what to do next.
Aaaaaaannd... we're back!
Tuesday, 02 March 2010 at 16:34
Well, I think everything's up and running once again.More to post later - this is just a test message.
