Wednesday 28 February 2007 at 7:38 pm
Saloncon convention chair Deb has posted
more information about what will be going on this year.
Consider this an open invite to all of my readers - Saloncon is the bee's knees. I'd love to hang out at the 'con with everyone there this year.
Wednesday 28 February 2007 at 2:53 pm
Lyssa and I are still spinning the masquerade ball at
Saloncon 2007, and we've got a lot of work ahead of us to come up with a setlist that gets people dancing and keeps them dancing. We have an excellent reason not to suck.
We're opening for
Voltaire.
No pressure. No pressure at all.
Wednesday 28 February 2007 at 2:46 pm
This morning, as I mentioned previously, I had made an appointment with a local dentist (Dr. Calvin Nguyen; 8622 Lee Highway, Suite A; Fairfax, VA 22031; telephone number 703-876-4600) to have two capped molars checked out because one of them has been giving me no end of trouble. I showed up about an hour early to fill out the requisite paperwork and get things worked out, and then went in for the main show.
Dr. Nguyen took a pair of x-rays and examined the area. Percussive sensitivity: Minimal. Temperature sensitivity: Ohholyshitstopstopstop...
No inflammation, no discharge, no bleeding.. just pain that comes and goes and seems to be linked to changes in blood pressure and temperature (hot and cold). I can't really tell how good a job he did because Dr. Nguyen didn't actually do much; what I can say is that for the first time since I got down here an x-ray didn't hurt, which says something, I guess.
I've got a prescription for painkillers though I've been taking Motrin for the discomfort (I'm saving the hardcore stuff in case the pain gets too bad) and an appointment with an endodontist (Dr. Richard Dellork; 124 Park Street SE, Suite 205; Vienna, VA 22180; telephone 703-281-5522) for tomorrow afternoon.
In all probability, I'm looking at a second root canal and a replacement crown for the second molar, and possibly a regimen of antibiotics to knock out whatever beasties might be lurking in the depths of a particular socket in my lower jaw.
Tuesday 27 February 2007 at 11:10 pm
After a long day of being utterly unable to concentrate for longer than five minutes at a stretch due to what I suspect is dental work going bad, I finally made it home with Lyssa, who promptly put me to bed to sleep for a couple of pain-free hours. Earlier today I managed to make an emergency appointment with a dentist recommended to me by Hasufin who seems to have more than half a clue for tomorow morning to get my dental work looked at. I'm going to have to pay it out of pocket, but given a choice between paying to have something done and waiting two weeks for my insurance to kick in, by which time I will probably be climbing the walls I'll take the former option. As it is I'm popping Tylenol every six hours like clockwork, and it's finally doing its job.
Unfortunately, seeing as how I've had a nap already tonight I can't really go to sleep just yet because my cycle's a little thrown off. Still, I'll take a little insomnia over the sensation of a string of
black cats detonating on top of my sinister trigeminal nerve every couple of minutes.
Maybe I'm turning into a wuss in my old age, but I'm starting to get sick of dealing with pain on a daily basis. Teeth, knee, shoulder, back (especially my back), the odd tension headache.. when I was younger I used to put up with this crap as a matter of course. It was part and parcel of getting through the day and getting things done. Now, I'm tired of just putting up with it. It's tiring; it saps your strength and your desire to do anything at all. When it's not there it feels like someone's injected whipped cream into your forebrain and you can't think quite so clearly as before.
Tuesday 27 February 2007 at 9:43 pm
They've unveiled their latest creation,
the Funker Sled, which is an all-metal snow sled, complete with a small flamethrower.
No, I'm not kidding. Neither are they.
Tuesday 27 February 2007 at 2:16 pm
A heads-up from
Lowmagnet brought a slim ray of sunshine to an otherwise unpleasant day: The novel
Pattern Recognition
by William Gibson is
being made into a movie, as of late 2006. Make of this what you will, it's listed in IMDB as being in active development, which could mean pretty much anything given how Hollywood works, but They've taken to Gibson's less popular stories (like
New Rose Hotel), so there's an excellent chance that this movie will actually wind up being made (though probably not get a theatrical release).
Tuesday 27 February 2007 at 10:13 am
The First Circuit Court of the USA
has upheld an important dictate of the Communications Decency Act, which sets a helpful precedent for bloggers and people who run web BBSes. Section 230 of the CDA states that the administrators of public forums which allow people to post are not, in fact, responsible for what their readers or users post. The court case this comes from is
Universal Communication Systems v. Lycos, in which people unknown were talking smack on UCS' stock prices. UCS decided to sue Lycos for running the board and not the users of the board (which they probably couldn't find), but the case was thrown out of court.
Tuesday 27 February 2007 at 09:53 am
'Remote access tool', that is - a little beastie (usually considered malware, though there are legit incarnations of this sort of software) that hides itself inside a workstation and lets someone connect remotely at any time and go through the system and silently monitor what the user is doing. Crackers have been using them for years for recon before an infiltration attempt, but only recently are the white hats finding uses for them. Such as watching what your kids are up to. Presenting
Snoopstick, an all in one package for infecting someone's box with a RAT that lets you keep an eye on what's happening.
More under the cut...
Monday 26 February 2007 at 1:53 pm
Lyssa and I are having new and exciting adventures in the world of health insurance this week. Lyssa needs to see a specialist for her eye, but unfortunately the nearest one to us doesn't work with her insurance company, and the out of pocket expense is more than either of us can front right now. Her appointment this morning wound up being a wash.. well, more like a spray of snow and slush on the roads because the state of Virginia, ever prepared for the snow, only cleared and salted the major roadways of the area, but no others.
In another chapter, I've been without health insurance for a couple of weeks now, and I'm busily searching for a policy that will not only cover my medical expenses, but also life insurance, and most importantly, a dental plan that doesn't require a transplant team to be on call for every procedure (because I'd be selling internal organs to cover the deductibles). Quite frankly, just paying for any medical procedures these days is so expensive, one would practically have to be Bill Gates to pay for anything in its entirety. Up until November of 2006, it would have been possible for Lyssa to get me onto her insurance policy (which is actually a pretty good one, save for the problems this morning that can be fixed with a referral to a different specialist) but
a certain bill was passed in the last election which screws us pretty thoroughly without the benefit of lubricant unless we get married.
We are currently considering our options.
Monday 26 February 2007 at 1:17 pm
Back in the late 90's, Dell offered computers for sale with Linux installed on them instead of Microsoft Windows, a move which got them sued and pressured to stop this practice. On 16 February 2007 they set up a website called
Dell Ideastorm to gather suggestions from their users and customers so that they could better work within the marketplace.
Well,
guess what the thousands of requests they recieved included - I'll give you a hint, the site got flattened by the influx of traffic and is still getting hammered.
In response to these requests they started adding lines of desktops and notebooks running
SUSE Linux from Novell to their online catalogues. Whether or not they'll be forced by other parties to stop doing this remains to be seen.
Sunday 25 February 2007 at 2:33 pm
I knew that something was going to happen when I spoke to my mom, and she mentioned getting ready for an ice storm in Pittsburgh on Saturday night.
That meant only one thing: It was headed toward DC.
Early this morning, I was awakened by the sound of snowflakes merrily ticking against the window above the bed that Lyssa and I share. Some time after we went to bed last night, the ice storm arrived in DC and the snow began to fall.
And fall.
And fall.
The local weather report says that we're looking and three to six inches of accumulation by the end of today, followed by what they euphemistically call a 'wintry mix' for the remainder of the night and into tomorrow. To the non-politically correct, this means that it's going to start sleeting, and probably freeze solid.
More under the cut...
Friday 23 February 2007 at 11:06 am
Very few software companies trust the JRE already installed on the target machine, so they bundle their own copy with their software and omit the option in the installer that lets the sysadmin opt out of installing that particular component.
This results in a single server having up to a dozen independent copies of the JRE that are identical down to the binary level, save their locations in the disk array.
Friday 23 February 2007 at 09:47 am
China is notorious the Net over for its anti-Internet political stance. Bloggers have to register, talking about democracy is a dangerous thing to do at best, and the Great Firewall of China makes a valiant attempt to filter net.traffic to keep the masses uninformed and unable to speak out. They've even managed to have Internet addiction considered a real social problem
treatable with hospitalisation and electroconvulsive therapy
More under the cut...
Friday 23 February 2007 at 08:43 am
Not too long ago, a woman named Debbie Foster was sued by Capitol Records (RIAA) for copyright infringement because someone was using her network access account to exchange music on $peer_to_peer_network. As it turned out during the investigation phase, someone had cracked the passphrase on her account and was using it without her knowledge. Thus, the lawsuit had to be dropped because the RIAA was suing the wrong person (which has never stopped them in the past). The RIAA was commanded by the court to pay her legal fees, which topped $50kus in total. The RIAA in turn
filed a motion for reconsideration, which would not only exempt them from paying her legal fees but it trying to get the judge to rule that the legally authorised user of an account or the owner of a net.connection is responsible for all of the activity associated with the account, regardless of whether or not you were the one using it.
More under the cut...
Thursday 22 February 2007 at 10:48 pm
Remember those old IBM keyboards with the clicky keys that sounded like gunshots when you really got going on the console? It's a shame that they're so rare these days... what was done to this one is definitely not a shame, though:
It's been turned into a steampunk typewriter keyboard, complete with working indicator lights and function keys numbered with roman numerals. All of the brass parts were hand fabricated, no less.. this is a true work of art.
Please note that some of the images are broken - I suspect that's because this site is being slashdotted since it hit Warren Ellis' weblog.
Thursday 22 February 2007 at 3:59 pm
It is the perogative of the system administrator to loot everything that could possibly be useful from his or her old office in the event of a forced move due to how easily important things get lost in the shuffle.
Thursday 22 February 2007 at 3:52 pm
In slightly less technical terms, researchers at the Toshiba Research Europe facility in Cambridge, England
have figured out how to make it harder for eavesdroppers to steal keying information from a quantum cryptosystem (registration required,
Bugmenot has login credentials for this site).
More under the cut...
Thursday 22 February 2007 at 10:58 am
Brad Willman, known to the underground as Omni-Potent,
has stepped forward after three years of secretly stalking online pedophiles and tipping off law enforcement. His primary tool was a trojan horse that appeared to be an image file but was actually a remote access tool that he posted to child porn-related newsgroups on Usenet. People would download and double-click them, which silently installed the utility. He would monitor feeds from multiple installations of this utility for up to 16 hours every day, gathering evidence that he indexed, filed, and passed along to police, even against their orders. Time and again, his data packages were ignored by police in Canada and the United States, but sometimes they'd act on what they'd been anonymously sent, and search warrants and arrests would result.
One of them was even a judge.
Willman is now working on a legitimate information security career.
Thursday 22 February 2007 at 10:52 am
Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have figured out how to use microphotolithography techniques
to make the world's smallest chainmail. The links are made of vapor deposited copper, and each link is 500 microns in diameter. Testing shows that the micro-chainmail has the tensile strength of nylon, can stretch 1/3 of its resting length, and is extremely flexible. As flexible as 'real' fabric, in fact.
Oh, and did I mention that it conducts electricity normally?
Wednesday 21 February 2007 at 3:21 pm
By now we've all seen what Photoshop is capable of - just look at
Worth 1000 for examples of things that just can't exist, and yet do have a strange sort of life on the screen. People can be added and deleted, colours can be changed, and still scenes can be fabricated from stock images after a couple of hours of skilled effort. Editing moving footage is more difficult, though, because you've got thirty-two frames in each second to edit, times however many seconds long a particular piece of footage is. Impossible? Hardly - video editing technology is an amazing thing. I don't think that I have to name any movies that make heavy use of video editing and rendering, because just about every movie does these days. The subtlety of the editing is what gets me, though -
tears can be added to moving footage of actors, facial expressions can be mathematically tweaked, and even random movements of eyes and the motions of breathing can be digitally removed. It is one thing, apparently, to create your own reality, but quite another to tweak one that looks so familiar, so real, that you can't tell that you're being tricked. It's even possible to create scenes that were never even shot - for example, in
The Crow, a few scenes that apparently starred Brandon Lee actually didn't, because they were digitally composited after his death.
The world's become a much stranger place, and most of us (myself included) weren't even aware of it.
Wednesday 21 February 2007 at 2:15 pm
One Abdul Tawala ibn Alishtari, also known as Michael Mixon, is a noted donor to the National Republican Congressional Committee, and has given in excess of $15kus in donations to the Committee since the year 2002. In fact, he was named a member of "the Inner Circle" of the committee because he's been so monetarily helpful, and was named Businessman of the Year by the state of New York two years in a row. The thing is,
he's now up on charges of terrorism and giving financial aid to terrorists because it's come out that he also donated around $152kus to known terrorist groups.
Wednesday 21 February 2007 at 2:06 pm
If you've been watching the Net for a while, you've probably heard about the monkey in a research lab at the
University of Pittsburgh that has a prosthetic arm wired directly to its brain with an implanted interface. The monkey seems to have gotten pretty good with it, too - while restrained
it can use the prosthetic arm to feed itself. If you follow the link to the neuro-bio lab
you can even watch it in realtime.
Tuesday 20 February 2007 at 10:25 pm
Oldsmobile Mike has posted
a Flickr set of his pictures from the Cruxshadows concert this weekend past.
Tuesday 20 February 2007 at 4:12 pm
Tissue regeneration therapies in mammals is progressing at an impressive pace. Everyone who's ever looked into the field knows that vertebrates lower on the evolutionary ladder are capable of regrowing lost limbs and organs, like salamanders and axolotls, but higher lifeforms really can't. The best that humans can do is putting things back more or less they way they were, a process that we all know as healing. Once something's gone, though, it's gone (save for the liver, which can infact regrow if a small portion of liver tissue remains and the rest of the body is properly cared for). That's a long way off from
regenerating the last joint of a human middle finger using extracts from pig bladders, though.
So far it's been tried and worked twice, on one Lee Spievack, who lost his finger in an accident involving a benched model airplane, and once on a neighbor of Alan Spievack (founder of ACell, a company that researches and manufactures the tissue regeneration compound). In both cases, the severed portion of finger regrew completely in four to six weeks, is fully usable, and has full sensation. The FDA signed off on it a while ago, and it's been in veterinary use for a while now to treat injured racehoses, so it's not exactly a new technology, just one that isn't in full use yet.
The thing is, they're not entirely sure how it works. The proteins inside the powder that are biologically active tell cells to start dividing and re-expressing the genes that would follow next, morphologically speaking, but the specifics still elude them. Their best hypothesis at this time is that the compounds tells the body to put things back the way they were without any specific commands ("do what I mean," in other words).
This is
definitely something to keep a close eye on.
Tuesday 20 February 2007 at 11:50 am
Due to the ice storm, Lyssa and I weren't able to get to the Farpoint sci-fi convention this weekend passed. As much as we would have liked to, the road conditions and extremely long drive were more than a little offputting. However, this brought a smile to my day: The crew from
Mystery Science Theatre 3000 (well, not really, but close enough for government work)
had a go at Serenity.
Tuesday 20 February 2007 at 09:16 am
Early adopters of Windows Vista have been finding themselves burned by an increasingly common problem in personal computing, namely, the utter lack of compatible drivers. Microsoft has been making it more and more difficult to write drivers these days, and a lot of companies weren't able to ship Vista-ready drivers by the time the new version of Windows hit the shelves and OEMs. Thus, they wind up on the manufacturers' websites, often hidden behind crappy search engines and mis-linked pages. This doesn't help you if your modem or network card doesn't work because - surprise, surprise - there are no drivers for it on the Windows or peripheral install CDs.
This is so much a problem that a group of people got together and set up
a website of links to Vista drivers to make it easier for end users to find what they need when they need it. Drivers for dozens of peripherals (including sound and video cards) from better than two dozen of the biggest, most popular manufacturers are represented here.
I strongly suggest passing the URl to this site around - it's too useful.
Tuesday 20 February 2007 at 09:06 am
In my almost-but-not-quite-there state yesterday, I managed to get the TARDIS down to the dealership for repairs. As I mentioned earlier, in the ice storm in DC last week, I managed to damage a couple of components in the undercarriage of my car.
First off, my car was about six thousand miles (!) overdue for maintenance and winterisation, which I take the blame for because I could probably have done so back in December of 2006 before the holiday season really set in. I know that my car was overdue for an oil change as well as a basic go-over. Due to the ice storm (in particular, the chunks of ice the size of your head that litter the ground) and a darth of safe, usable parking spaces in the DC area, I managed to break a couple of the clips in the undercarriage that hold the front bumper in place.
My car is a bit smaller than I would like, and rides much lower to the ground than I would like on top of that, which means that there is less clearance to the undercarriage.
At any rate, the few times that I got hung up trying to back out of parking spaces, the lower edge of the front bumper would catch on the ice. Gunning the engine and rocking the car would eventually free the hang-up, but at the cost of damaging those little clips, which meant that the lower edge of the front bumper came loose and would drag on the ground when moving at speed.
This also meant that the lower edge would collect ice and snow and freeze to the ground after a while, which exacerbated the problem.
Thankfully, I've got some good mechanics at the dealership, and they were able to bend everything back into place and replace the damaged parts, so the TARDIS is driving as good as new these days.
Monday 19 February 2007 at 9:13 pm
Lyssa and I spent a good portion of Saturday sitting around relaxing. Lyssa had preordered
the first season boxed set of Beauty and the Beast and we watched the first disc on Saturday afternoon while I wrote and hacked for a while on a project I've been working on. Later in the afternoon we headed out to get sushi for dinner at Konami in northern Virginia, and then set forth for Jarin's apartment for his Chinese New Year party, which almost didn't happen.
More under the cut...
Monday 19 February 2007 at 03:07 am
Holy. Cats.
Getting to meet Angel Spit.
Finally hearing
Fiction 8 played down here.
The Cruxshadows in concert in DC.
Getting to go up on stage and dance.
I'm going to bed.
Friday 16 February 2007 at 3:38 pm
The Hitachi corporation has come out with a new generation of RFID tags, and get this: They're about as large around as a human hair and 5 microns thick. In fact, they're unobtrusive to the tune of
0.05mm by 0.0.05mm in size. They're calling it RFID dust, and it's an order of magnetude smaller than the smallest RFID chips that Hitachi has on the market, the so-called
mu-chips, which are only 0.4mm on a side. RFID dust doesn't have a lot of storage capacity, at most 128 bits of data, but they're so tiny, they could probably be deployed by aerosolising them and spraying them on things along with a binder of some kind, something along the lines of hairspray.
Friday 16 February 2007 at 10:36 am
It seems that the bird flu, which has a disproportionate number of people scrambling for grey market antibiotics and sterile facemasks (a rant that you can be sure I've been prepping for a while)
is making financial and networking industry high ups wonder what would happen to the Net in the event of a real outbreak. Their reasoning seems simple enough: In the event of an outbreak of the avian flu that posed a serious threat to people in the US, many thousands would want to work from home to minimise their chances of being infected. However, it is also their reasoning that the Net would be completely swamped with people accessing sites like Youtube and Google Groups, which would use up all of the available bandwidth, and probably cripple essential services that use the Net for information transfer and access. Thus, they are calling for the curtailing and restriction of net.traffic if such a thing should happen.
I think that they're wrong, and that the matter isn't quite as simple as they make it out to be.
More under the cut...
Friday 16 February 2007 at 08:52 am
An outfit called Innovative Fabrications
is specialising in furniture with hidden compartments for Joe and Jane Average, though their prices are a bit more than /J*e Average/ can probably afford at the drop of a hat. That's not why I'm not so sure about them, though... if you click around in their catalogue, you'll notice two things: One, the styles of furniture, or at least the ones pictured, are a bit too old fashioned to blend in well with the furniture that people these days are likely to buy. Someone with a bit of common sense and a bit of training would probably look around the house and head right for the stuff that doesn't seem to really match, and start searching there first. For example, you really don't see many three-shelf bookcases these days. Generally speaking, if you're the sort that actually needs a full bookcase, you're going to go for the five shelf bookcases, because they're readily available and leave room for growth and places to put knick-knacks.
Secondly, the places where the hidden compartments are located are disproportionate to the rest of the table (this ties in with the slight-anachronistic look i mentioned earlier). As law enforcement would put it (and from the perspective of a psychologist, this makes sense), the best hidden compartments are those positioned in locations that look as if there really isn't enough room for anything to be hidden. An end table with a tabletop big enough to stash a coffee mug in stands out, and would probably sound hollow. As for what you'd hide inside of it, if you really wanted to keep it private you'd best be served prying up a floorboard or two, or building a compartment into the wall or something like that.
Another thing that gets me is how all of the stuff they sell is described in terms of "number of guns it can hold" and not cubic capacity or concealability.
Friday 16 February 2007 at 08:32 am
My
.plan file has been updated. Per usual, a lot of it probably isn't safe for work if you go through a proxy server with content filtering capabilities.
Friday 16 February 2007 at 12:06 am
Well, my body turned 29 a couple of hours ago, and here I sit with a full stomach looking back on the year just gone by. Orthaevelve and Lyssa took me out for dinner at the China Star for my birthday tonight, and afterward we hit up Whole Paycheque for a tasty German chocolate cake that I've been sharing with everyone that came over tonight after we got home (that'd be Hasufin, who was kind enough to bring a shovel to help me free the TARDIS again) to hang out.
Since last year, life's taken a decidedly good turn for the better, no matter how you cut it. I got to go travelling more with Lyssa, vis a vis to Walking the Thresholds, which was where I held my first seminar. I got to make a lot of new friends there, too, namely Heron61, Amberite, Teaotter, and MMSword. I even got to meet some nifty folks within spitting distance of my lair (yeah, I'm looking at you, Orthaevelve, Tenshi, and Raven). I've been getting out a lot more, now that I think of it - Saloncon, visiting the Ferrett and Gini, going to HOPE 2006 with Lyssa, my first train ride...
More under the cut...
Thursday 15 February 2007 at 10:40 pm
Following the death of Terrence McKenna in the year 2000, the Esalen Institute took ownership of his voluminous library of rare texts and an uncatalogued number of his notes, diaries, and other pieces of written information that accumulated through the course of his life. On 5 February
a five-alarm fire broke out in the building in Monterey that the library was kept in, destroying everything. An incredible amount of information was lost in the blaze that also consumed a couple of restaurants, a coffee shop, and several other office blocks. So many rare tomes, some dating back to the 1800's at the very least are now gone.
What a loss. What a horrible loss.
Thursday 15 February 2007 at 3:19 pm
If you've watched television for any length of time, chances are you've seen the classic FAA blips-on-a-screen representations of air traffic over the United States. A student at UCLA has taken this to the next level by generating
high-res 3d movies of air traffic over the country. They're all in QuickTime format, so you'll have to have the appropriate CODECs or players installed. The animations are an interesting diversion, if nothing else. There is a version where each kind of flight is colour-coded, a 3D dome projection (nice work on that, incidentally), and even one where an amorphous blob is generated by all of the traffic.
Wednesday 14 February 2007 at 8:38 pm
As one would surmise, it's Valentine's Day, so Lyssa and I had planned to go to a local restaurant (the
Sweetwater Tavern) for dinner to celebrate after work tonight. Little did we realise that it would turn into something of an adventure right from the outset.
As I wrote earlier today, DC was hit by what was considered a major ice storm last night, and temperatures continue to fall. Not only does this mean that roadways transformed into ice skating rinks (which eventually caused the shutdown of part of the outer loop of the beltway today due to a multi-car pileup) but it also meant that vehicles would be coated with ice and sometimes even frozen in place...
You can see where this is going.
More under the cut...
Wednesday 14 February 2007 at 11:57 am
The encryption algorithms for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD content
have been cracked!
The processing key is one of the keys used in the process of generating the media key, the unique key that encrypts the contents of a particular DVD. Due to the encryption algorithm used in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD technologies, they keys seem to work in a hierarchial manner: If you compromise a key lower in the hierarchy, you crack media. Compromise a key higher up in the hierarchy, and you crack all of the media encrypted underneath it.. meaning that all of the new generation DVDs may be freely decrypted, or at least up until they start pressing new-gen DVDs with a new processing key. Arnezami, the hacker who figured out how to crack AACS with this technique, refuses to state what software or hardware he compromised to get the processing key; given his description of the process (which does not, let me state, involve reverse engineering, only scanning memory contents) I surmise that he was working with a software player. Either that, or he's got one hell of a digital electronics lab at his disposal... by not tipping The Powers That Be off to what he compromised, this makes it harder for them to change things around and make it harder to find the keys again later.
The processing key he sussed out is this:
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Wednesday 14 February 2007 at 11:07 am
Around 0000 EST/EDT today (just before going to bed) we lost power for a couple of minutes. The UPSes in the apartment took up the slack, but it's always worrisome when it's cold as all get out and the power dies. It came back on a few minutes later but
not everyone was so lucky around here - over 120,000 homes are still without power due to the ice storm last night. MAT (Maryland Authority Transit) has shut down for the day due to the ice.
I can see out of my office window that at least one school around here has cancelled class because the kids are sledding on the hill behind the apartment complex.
Wednesday 14 February 2007 at 09:15 am
DC is a winter wonderland - as the title implies, the US government is on a two hour delay following an all-night ice storm that's left everything buried underneath an inch of solid ice. The beltway, from my vantage point at home, is moving at a nice clip for a change, but that's because there are so few cars on it this morning; normally it's bumper to bumper now you can actually see measurable gaps between them. As you might have guessed I'm working from home today because I can't make it to the Metro station without risking life, limb, and TARDIS. Lyssa's working from home, also, but that's because her office has broadcast an 'everybody work from home today' message to the workforce.
I'm going to go out and snap a few pictures of the snow and ice after I finish my coffee.
As if that weren't enough,
the Ferrett's snowed in, too, and he's one of the most hardcore people I know. He is, however, worse off than a lot of DC seems to be.
Tuesday 13 February 2007 at 7:29 pm
The trick to getting my cellphone to charge successfully is to
twist the charger a little after you plug it in on the flat axis. This aligns the prongs in the power outlet such that they make contact and allow current to flow.
Tuesday 13 February 2007 at 5:19 pm
I really did find these at Whole Paycheque last night. I know that DC's a liberal kind of place, but this is something else entirely.
Tuesday 13 February 2007 at 5:15 pm
It's cold. It's snowing. It's sleeting. The roads are nasty. I just got home and I'm staying home.
Tuesday 13 February 2007 at 2:02 pm
A bill recently introduced to the California legislature
would require all female children to be vaccinated for HPV (human papilloma virus, which causes some forms of cervical cancer and genital warts). Parents, however, are outraged by this bill because the vaccine would protect against a virus that is technically a sexually transmitted disease. Some are going so far as to say that it encourages teenage sex and promiscuity.
I hate to tell them (well, no, I don't, but allow me the figure of speech) but women are not exposed to HPV solely through sex; it is not uncommon for rape to be a factor in disease exposure, and it makes good sense to cover all the bases. Also, vaccinations are not only for children - the immunity they confer is lifelong, and would protect women against HPV exposure when they are adults as well. As for whether or not this vaccine would encourage irresponsible sexual activity, I strongly doubt that it would be a factor. Teens will be teens and short of locking every last teenager up (oh, wait, that's what high school is for...) you can't stomp out sex among them. We've all seen the studies that show that abstinence education is,in a word, worthless, and the studies that show that honest sex education can lower the teenage sex rate (mostly because laying out the risks, complete with photographs and videotapes, scares the hell out of 'em).
I wonder how much of this is tied into the movement that refuses any vaccination of children because they think it causes autism (due to the mercury-containing preservative thimerosol, which actually isn't used anymore)...
As many as 50% of all people will be exposed to HPV during their lives; men can carry it, women can contract it.
Tuesday 13 February 2007 at 11:39 am
Let me see.. temperatures fell yesterday and it's been snowing pretty constantly all morning. This isn't, in itself, really a bad thing because it's been warmer than it has been lately (if the air's too cold it won't snow) but travelling is going to be a pain because DC drivers, as I've mentioned before, forget how to drive whenever something starts falling from the sky. The fairest thing one can say is that the ones who drive at a fraction of the speed limit are less likely to go out of control and cause a wreck.
On the other hand, thirteen stories straight up (where I work), it's downright freezing. Once again, cow-orkers are hard at work while wearing ski jackets, parkas, and scarves with just their fingertips exposed if at all possible. You'd think that they'd install insulated windows in an ultra-modern office building, but this is sadly not the case.
On top of all of this, my cellphone, which has phone numbers of cow-orkers that I need for work has up and died on me again, I think for keeps this time. I can't charge the power cell because the recharger doesn't seem to do anything. I wonder if it's not the recharger itself that's failed, though I am kind of hard on phones... acquiring a replacement is in the works at this time.
Monday 12 February 2007 at 2:44 pm
And now, your weekly fan's writeup of
The Dresden Files. Those who aren't fans, don't want spoilers, or plain just don't care can skip this entry.
Last night's episode was called
Hair of the Dog...
More under the cut...
