Sometimes the only thing you can do is look on in horror and hope that the shrapnel doesn't reach you.

Monday 31 December 2007 at 08:19 am It's the last day of the common year 2007, and between the rain and low temperatures (hovering near but not quite at the freezing point as of 0730 EST5EDT) roadways in the DC metroplex are, in short, treacherous. I nearly slipped walking down the steps from my apartment building, and my car was limned with a thin sheet of frost that had to be melted away before I was going anywhere. After getting underway, however, I discovered much to my chagrin that patches of Lee Highway in northern Virginia were sheets of ice that gave the ol' anti-lock brakes a workout.

Not so much for the Redtop cab a good forty feet in front at that particular moment. As near as I can reconstruct the cabbie hit the same sheet of ice that I did at a slightly higher speed, but rather than keep going straight he hit it at an angle (while correcting, I suppose) and went into a skid. A skid that gradually transformed into a broad oscillation that encompassed three lanes of highway, including the turning lane. Right.. left.. right again.. left again.. right.. the whole time farther and farther left and into oncoming traffic.

Press pause.

At this moment a number of thoughts went through my mind more or less simultaneously. Everything from "Holy fucking shit, that guy's headed into oncoming traffic," to "I hope the wreckage doesn't go spinning back towards me or anyone behind me," to "Is that cab going to spin out?"

Start playback again.

From what I know of the situation, everything ended well for the Redtop - rather than getting into a head-on collision courtesy of eastbound traffic, he managed to bring the car to a stop in the oncoming lanes. The vehicle that happened to be occupying that lane of traffic started to slow down well before the cab came to a stop, and brought all of the cars behind him to a stop with them. Net result: One shaken cabbie staring at a line of workaday traffic in the morning December sun. The farthest lane of traffic never even had to slow down.

Ladies, gentlemen, and other lifeforms, there's a very good reason that being told "May you have a boring day" is, in fact, complimentary. Times like this are why.

When sufficiently motivated by boredom, there is no limit to what I can accomplish.

Sunday 30 December 2007 at 11:19 pm I've spent most of the day hanging out at Laurelinde's house with Lyssa and the family, and after fixing my watch fob, practising with my new fountain pen (thanks, Laurelinde!), eating dinner, opening gifts (a walking stick with a handle depicting what appears to be the Roman deity Janus, a copy of The Doctor Who Pattern Book, and a copy ofFlame Wars edited by Mark Dery), and doing a bit of reading, I decided to try to install some of my favourite games on my new laptop - yes, my addiction to Infocom games has reared its ugly head once again. I installed DOSbox and started figuring out how to fake a floppy drive when all you have is a couple of directories containing the files that were originally on the floppy disks.

You know, this is a little too gimpy for my usual posts, so I'll put the rest of this entry behind a cut. Feel free to skip over my squeeing over twenty-five year old video games if you like.
More under the cut...

Thursday on the town: The Dresden Dolls!

Friday 28 December 2007 at 5:17 pm How about something far more cheerful in my life these days - like Lyssa, Laurelinde, and I going to see the Dresden Dolls last night?

After arriving home from work yesterday afternoon I hurried into the bedroom to change into more suitable attire for attending a concert put on by what is best described as a punk cabaret duo, namely Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione. I traded my jeans for black linen trousers, black elastic braces, threw on an electric blue necktie, and pulled my Victorian-cut tailcoat from the closet. I traded the USB key on my watch fob for a brass skeleton key and was set for the evening. Lyssa wore her bone china-white lace blouse, a red housecoat, and black trousers; Laurelinde wore most of a tuxedo and the pocket watch I'd gotten her for Yule. Suitably attired, the three of us hit the local Metro station and rode the train all the way out to Chinatown, where the synagogue the Dolls would be playing at was located. Surprisingly, we didn't catch much attention on the way there, something that I'd half expected.

It seems that we were in a hurry to stand in line in the freezing cold yesterday afternoon. It didn't take us long at all to walk to the synagogue and take up position at the end of a line that stretched down and around the block. It felt like home, standing there with other Dolls fans: There were gothic lolitas standing next to boys and girls in china doll makeup, vickys and steampunks huddling together for warmth, old-school and new-school punks watching the rescue squad drive by, and a sizable contingent of fans who don't fit into any particular subculture save the fact that they're fans. There was even someone scalping tickets, much to my surprise.
More under the cut...

I should have expected this from a trip to the dentist's office.

Friday 28 December 2007 at 12:30 pm Early this morning was my final trip to the dentist's office of 2007. I figured that, seeing as how I'm on the road so much I should get a checkup and cleaning before New Year's to make sure that there's nothing pressing in the immediate future.

I could stretch this entry out and make it look interesting or even entertaining, but frankly I'm not in the mood for such creative writing at the moment.

I'm looking at four crowns, one of them ASAP before the cavity bores completely under the bicuspid's filling. I'm probably looking at four more root canals. As if that weren't enough, my dental insurance has me on a twelve month countdown before they'll cover 'major procedures' to any extent. Root canals, fillings, and the installation of crowns are considered 'major procedures', so they really only covered the cleaning. Another six months has to pass before they'll cover the cleanout and buildup, which has been estimated around $800us in cash up front.

As if that weren't enough, I'll be spending all but one week of January on the road, so I'll have to try to swing my appointments for the weekends, assuming that I'll have any free.

Dear Santa: I'll give back the GPS unit if you'll just give me a decent set of teeth. I'll even take a pass on gifts for the next three or four years if you can swing that.

On top of all of this, I brought the wrong power supply for my laptop - when the power cells are drained, that's it for today.

A blast from the past: Heathkit is back!

Thursday 27 December 2007 at 2:53 pm Children of the 80's will no doubt remember the company Heathkit, which was famous for selling all sorts of kits for the hobbyist, most notably a personal robot called HERO-1. They're still not down and out after all these years - in fact, they're going to be selling another personal robot kit called HE-RObot which will be based on industry-standard Wintel hardware. An advance release of the specs shows that HE-RObot's processor cores will be Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs on a mini-ITX mainboard, 80GB hard drive, USB-based machine management system (whatever that is), CD-ROM drive, multiple infrared sensors, a webcam, and remote control capabilities. HE-RObot will run Windows XP Pro as its OS, but you can bet that'll change in a hurry once they go into release (projected to be in the first quarter of 2008).

As one of those 80's kids with fond dreams of hacking code for the HERO-1 way back when (which never came to pass), this makes me sit up and start drooling. Besides, you just know that I'd be tricking mine out with synthesized voice samples from a certain video game from my youth...

State of the Time Lord: I never could stay put for very long...

Sunday 23 December 2007 at 7:52 pm I'm writing this update from Lyssa's parents' house once again - the holiday is here once again (however you happen to celebrate it), and this year we've gone back to visit our families. We left around 1200 EST5EDT yesterday in an attempt to beat the traffic rush headed to points north, west, east, and everywhere but the southern half of the compass rose. Traffic, weather, and being worn out from staying up far too late the night before being what they are, we pulled in around 1730 EST5EDT, a respectable timetable for leaving at noon.

The fairest thing you can say is that we didn't get into trouble on the way up, unlike last year (when we got rear-ended on 270 north). After getting the TARDIS unpacked Lyssa, her mother, and I headed to the local Bob Evans restaurant to have dinner and talk for a while before we retired for the evening.

Our usual shortcut through West Virginia to get to southwestern PA was more of an adventure than usual yesterday due to the dense fog cover. Once we hit the mountains of West Virginia, it was like we'd driven out of Time and had gone adrift in the clouds of possibility between Here and There. Visibility was cut to little more then thirty feet in front of us, the only landmarks the solid yellow line to our let and the broken white line flashing by on the pavement to our right. You couldn't see the trees or the other cars. You couldn't see the guard rail. You couldn't even see the dropoffs on the left or right. It felt for all the worlds like we were picking our way across a precipice spanning a puffy white abyss, with no sense of time or distance. We got somewhere when we got somewhere, not before and not after. It was an unusual feeling, to be sure - being in one of the soft places, the in between places. By the time we got within spitting distance of our destination, we'd made it through the cloud cover and were treated to a vision of something rarely seen in the DC metroplex: A beautiful Pennsylvania sunset.

Say what you will about Pennsylvania (gods know, I do) but they have wonderful sunsets there.

A solid sky of blue. Thick greyish-blue clouds breaking up toward the horizon. Bright pink and orange clouds reflecting the sun's light. Streaks of charcoal creeping like tendrils of shadow upward from the opposite horizon. I wish we'd had time to stop and take some proper photographs of this spectacle, doubly so because I couldn't admire the view for very long as I was driving this time.

Thursday night wound up being something of a screwup - I left work on time but got caught in traffic as everyone and their backup left work and charged for the on-ramps to the Beltway. A thirty-minute trip wound up taking over one and one-half hours, which put me well behind schedule. Laurelinde was late, also - she got on the Metro late and didn't arrive until well after 1800 EST5EDT, which pushed dinner back.

Ordinarily this isn't terribly problematic, but I was running late for the giving of a gift at the Mad Scientist Coffee Klatsch that night: Everyone had chipped in finds to purchase a Dyna Med BLS Kit for Orthaevelve, who'd gotten her EMT certification a couple of months ago and needed a field kit to do her job properly. As it was, I didn't arrive until well after 2000 hours, and had missed the giving of the gift. I'd also brought the card that everyone was supposed to sign late.

I feel bad about that.
More under the cut...

If you live in Texas and need to evacuate, I hope you kept your nose clean.

Friday 21 December 2007 at 1:43 pm One Jack Colley of the state of Texas is starting up a program which will require criminal record checks of people attempting to evacuate in the event of a natural disaster; the idea is that they want to weed out convicted felons to ensure that they can't prey upon anyone else trying to get to safety. Everyone attempting to board the evacuation buses will be issued a wristband with information encoded on it that will be used to identify people getting onto and later off of the buses. The data would be transmitted to the University of Texas Space Research Center for analysis.

Colley as written about seems to be missing the point: If a hurricane hits part of Texas most everyone in their right mind, felon and otherwise, are going to have one goal: Getting the hell out of there. Where the rubber meets the road, when all hell's breaking loose no one's going to have time for any wrongdoing. They're going to have survival first and foremost on their minds, and anything beyond that is going to come after they've gotten settled in, as proven by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. It's entirely possible that he's being taken out of context to make it seem that way.

The article continues: By culling people like convicted sex offenders from the mass of people trying to get to safety, they say they're going to help them evacuate. I don't know about anyone else, but this strikes me as poorly concealed doublespeak.

Colley refused to discuss the background checks and their thoroughness, as well as the procedures that they'd be following. This is actually pretty standard for the policies and procedures of any company or agency. Unless you need to know, they won't tell you. As for the background checks, they're usually subcontracted out to other groups, and the units higher up probably won't even know what'll be done. By and large background checks are like black boxes: You put requests in, you get some results back, and from those results you make your decision. The what and wherefore usually aren't sent with the results. The really interesting stuff happens at the level of the people running queries and doing the legwork.

Call me crazy, but something's not sitting right here. The article spins Colley as a dismissive authoritarian of the sort that the people on the far right love to raise hue and cry over and I'm willing to be that it'll make it onto Coast to Coast AM soon if it hasn't already. The way it's written makes it look far too paranoid, with a liberally applied icing of "keep looking over your shoulder" all over it.

There's just one thing about looking over your shoulder all the time - it means that you aren't looking anywhere else.

Anybody for some high voltage Christmas cheer?

Friday 21 December 2007 at 09:20 am This is possibly the most awe inspiring thing that I've seen all year; in fact, I think it's a fitting way to close out the year and celebrate the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. This guy rigged up a Tesla coil and a framework into a Christmas tree.

No, I'm not kidding.

Fun Fever constructed a large Tesla coil (a multiple circuit resonant electrical transformer) and a metal framework that would shape the electrical discharges in a particular way, namely, a tree with a star on top. Quite a bit of experimentation was required to get the shape right as well as to develop a method of supporting the structure. Included in the article are point-in-time photographs of the development process, as well as a few pictures taken from overhead by a camera protected by a Faraday cage.

The colors of the various parts of the structure were made not by the coil, but with a series of optical filters set in front of the camera. Yes, it's kind of cheating, but electricity only comes in so many colors, and unfortunately bright green isn't often one of them (nor can one rely upon it to reliably change colors to the ones you want at any given moment in time). Once the coil was fired up a grounded probe (a very long fishing pole) was used to pull sheets of electricity to the proper points of the frame to create the desired effect. The final photograph of the page shows the complete tree, and the creator dressed as Chris Cringle himself.

Most impressive, I must admit.

Judge rules that Torrentspy destroyed evidence.

Friday 21 December 2007 at 08:20 am The BitTorrent tracker search engine Torrentspy, which has been coming under fire increasingly in the past few months has taken a shot broadside, leaving the future of the site uncertain. A federal judge in the state of California ruled that the admins of the site lied under oath and destroyed evidence demanded by the MPAA for their prosecution. It was asserted that the admins of the forum also run by the search engine edited posts to conceal the subject matter and set up hidden forums for the discussion of privacy once it became clear that they were under scrutiny. The admins of the site also lied when they stated that they could not log the IP addresses of users; in fact, once the excrement hit the air circulation mechanism they stopped logging entirely, and later blocked users with IP addresses within the US grid (not that this really stopped anyone). The net result was that Torrentspy was trying to screw the MPAA over and they got caught doing so. As for what will happen to the site, it'll probably be shut down in a couple of months, only to clear the way for another half-dozen or so BitTorrent tracker search engines (there are already a few new ones).

Federal judge decrees that divulging your PGP passphrase violates the fifth amendment.

Thursday 20 December 2007 at 2:37 pm I can't say that I'm wild about the circumstances behind this (in fact, it's taken two days to calm down sufficiently to write about it without ranting), but the ramifications of this ruling are far-reaching and not a bit relevant these days.

In 2006, a Canadian citizen named Sebastien Boucher crossed the border into the United States and was stopped. His laptop was searched by US Customs agents. Allegedly, thousands of images related to child pornography were found on the drive (in case you haven't heard, US ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) reserves the right to examine and make disk images of laptops these days). Following his arrest, the laptop was powered down and seized as evidence. A week later they booted it back up and discovered that the partition on the hard drive containing the images was encrypted with PGP Disk and could not be examined. What probably happened was that they caught him with the software accessing the encrypted partition, but when they shut it down they lost access to the data because the passphrase was wiped from RAM. Oops.

To cut to the chase, US Magistrate Judge Jerome Niedermeier ruled that Boucher could not be compelled to divulge the passphrase to the encrypted disk partition because it constituted a violation of his fifth amendment rights, the right to freedom from self-incrimination.

Now, this is interesting for everyone else in the country who doesn't like the idea of strange people poking around inside their laptops while traveling. First of all, more and more people carry business-related information with them on the road. If you have a laptop, chances are you don't have a choice because you could be called upon to work anywhere, anywhen. By allowing them to take images of your laptop's hard drive you run the risk of exposing that data, and consequently running afoul of any NDAs that you've had to sign. Secondly, why in the hell would they want to be poking around in there without probable cause? When last I checked, personal privacy was a concept predicated on the idea that what you do on your own time was nobody else's business unless you made it public, and not on the idea that wanting to keep something private meant that you were hiding something.

Living on the run: Camping in airports.

Tuesday 18 December 2007 at 12:44 pm Given what happened with the wedding of 'lex Pendragon and Marlise this past weekend with some of the attendees and celebrants having problems attending due to delayed airplane flights or layovers due to weather, I think it'd be a good idea to post something about camping out in airports: Why you might have to do, how to do it, and what to look for.

While there are some people who actually plan to camp out in airline terminals for various reasons, most people don't. Those of us that do are usually constrained by transportation to the airport to begin with: Daily rates for parking cars in the lots are exorbitant, and you can't always find someone that can drive you to the airport at 0300 so you can catch an 0600 flight. Or, during this time of year, you can't always find someone who can drive you to the airport at 0300 so that you can catch an 0800 flight because the security checkpoints are backed up to the tune of hours in line (which I encountered, incidentally, during my trip to Palo Alto, California). Under such circumstances, it makes sense to arrive at a time reasonable for your transportation (say, 2200 local time), navigate security, and then find someplace to camp out for the night.

Another reason is that flights may be delayed or canceled out from under you, and you'll have to wait some period of time before another flight becomes available. If you're lucky another flight might be two hours off. If you're not it might be seven hours off, or the airline could advise you to stay in a hotel for the night. None of these are particularly pleasant affairs, but if you're stuck in a strange city waiting to catch a plane you do what you have to do.

Edit: Google now has a feature in which you can query your airline and flight number, and it'll tell you the status of your flight.
More under the cut...

Any sufficiently advanced marketing technique is indistinguishable from paranoid schizophrenia.

Tuesday 18 December 2007 at 10:09 am For a couple of weeks now, people in major cities like New York City and Los Angeles have been experiencing something far more unusual: Voices in their heads that suddenly cause them to look up at billboards. It isn't auditory hallucinations causing this but snipers armed with tight-cone directional sonic projectors aiming recorded sounds at people on the street as part of an advertising campaign for a show on A&E called Paranormal State. The device in question is called Audio Spotlight from Holosonics and involves the use of carefully tuned ultrasonic speakers. The principle behind this is that ultrasound can be generated such that it will eventually be heard due to distortion as it passes through the atmosphere, and that the audible sound thus produced will be heard in only a small area, often a circle a couple of feet across.

There's an interesting article in Advertising Age magazine, but you need a paid subscription to read it. I have a copy of the article someplace but I don't have access to it at the moment. It talks about some of the things noticed with this technique, namely, the operators of the Audio Spotlight devices fucking with people while on the job, which isn't a terribly nice thing to do to someone.
More under the cut...

Podcaster J.C. Hutchins has landed a publishing deal!

Monday 17 December 2007 at 2:40 pm Congratulations to podcaster and novelist J.C. Hutchins who has landed a publishing contract with St. Martin's Press for the trilogy 7th Son. Hutchins recorded the three novels (Descent, Deceit, and Destruction) as a series of audiobooks over the past two years, and released them one episode at a time in the form of podcasts that have generated for him not only a legion of fans that call themselves the Beta Clone Army but serious coverage in such newspapers as the New York Times.

The 7th Son trilogy depicts the adventures of seven men brought together by a secret government project following the assassination of a fictional President of the United States by a four year old child, who then suddenly dies of a mysterious illness while in custody. The men discover that they are in fact clones, and that their memories are duplicates of the original, referred to as "John Alpha" by the project. Their assignment is to locate John Alpha and apprehend him because he was the assassin...

The first novel, Descent, is scheduled for release in the year 2009.

I've been a fan of 7th Son since late in 2006, close to the end of the first series. I'm a fan of science fiction and picky as hell, so I don't recommend this series to you lightly. While it isn't hard SF in the vein of Orion's Arm or the work of Charles Stross, it's very accessible to people who aren't highly technical, enjoyable by those who are, and overall well written. Hutchins performed the entire series by himself, going so far as to develop individual voices for each character in the story and tracking down postcast-safe music for the series. I recommend downloading and listening to the first couple of podcasts to listen to if you're not sure that you'll like it - they're free, so you're not ponying up anything but a little bit of download time and disk space.

Congratulations, Alexius and Marlise!

Monday 17 December 2007 at 1:40 pm This weekend was a wacky adventure from start to finish - not only for Lyssa, Laurelinde, and myself, but it marked the beginning of a similar adventure for some good friends of mine, 'lex Pendragon and Marlise, who reside just north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as well as their daughter Raven.

On Friday afternoon the three of us loaded up the TARDIS and headed northward for Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, and points beyond to get ready for the wedding on Saturday. It didn't take us long at all to get loaded up (I've gotten quite skilled at throwing together clothes for a weekend junket in a hurry) and on the road. For the first leg of our trip I set myself up in the back of the car with Windbringer to read my e-mail while Laurelinde handled the driving (because she can handle long drives better than I can). However, it took us the better part of two hours to get off of route 270 north because a two car pileup (specifically, a car and an SUV that had to be cut apart on the side of the road) had backed traffic up as far as the beltway. Sadly, I was so ensconced in my e-mail and then catching up on my reading that I didn't realize what was going on until Lyssa pointed out the wreck on the side of the road. Because of this, the three of us didn't get to Cracker Barrel in Maryland (our Pennsylvania trip watering hole) and thus dinner until around 2100 EST5EDT on Friday. Thankfully the rest of the drive to the hotel (situated in Cranberry, Pennsylvania) was uneventful despite traffic and weather, though we didn't actually get to sleep until 0230 EST5EDT on Saturday morning.

Rehearsal for the ceremony (which had to be partially rewritten due to the fact that two people with parts in the ceremony had to cancel at the last minute) was at 0830 on Saturday. This meant getting up at 0630 to get a shower, get dressed, get breakfast from the crappy buffet at the hotel, and then figure out how to get to the house of 'lex and Marlise from the hotel. This actually wound up being a fairly simple task - a half hour's drive at most. I wound up being the first at rehearsal on Saturday morning, specifically, I had to wake a couple of people up by way of 'lex calling in because everyone else was still asleep.

It figures - the first time I found where I was going right off the bat, I was also too early.
More under the cut...

Now that I've managed to free up some time, why have things been so quiet lately?

Friday 14 December 2007 at 12:33 pm That's actually a pretty easy question to answer. First off, my job's kept me very busy the past couple of weeks - I've been spending between two and three weeks on the road for a while now, and when I'm not flying hither and yon work at the office has kept me running hard to stay in place. All things being equal, I've been more concerned with work and getting ready for the Yule holiday than I have about reading the newsfeeds and posting. That's not to say that I haven't been having wacky adventure, those seem to find me without much difficulty. From going to dinner with Pace Reagan-Smith and her family in Austin, Texas to the hills surrounding San Francisco, California, to a late-night dinner with Bladeless Axe Without A Handle in Palo Alto, California, life's been pretty busy. Also, life has been extremely exhausting lately. After flying back in from Austin I slept for most of the next day; after flying back in from Palo Alto I got up early to clean the apartment with Lyssa, construct a new firewall, and then get dressed up to go to a Pretend To Be A Time Traveler Day party at Scraun and Fishy's place.

I suppose that I should write a short summary of the high points:

A couple of weeks ago while on assignment in St. Louis (where I met some nifty people who went to school with Hasufin, I hasten to add) Windbringer and I ran into serious difficulties, namely, he kept overheating and crashing hard. When you're in the middle of writing code while a couple of high-priority jobs are running in the background (jobs which were never designed to checkpoint their state periodically) this is a serious problem. While on the road lately I've noticed that he's been getting worse: He doesn't always power down cleanly, there are great difficulties connecting to wireless or wired networks, and most important of all USB support is unreliable in the extreme. In short, these are the same symptoms that Kabuki evidenced years ago when she first began to fail.

Not good.
More under the cut...

A quick weekend recap.

Monday 10 December 2007 at 10:59 pm Saturday was Pretend To Be A Time Traveller Day. I spent most of it constructing a new firewall and the evening prepping for the party over at Scraun and Fishy's. Lyssa was kind enough to take a couple of pictures after we got home that night.

Sunday: Recovering at Laurelinde's place with the family. I passed out on the couch sometime around 2200 EST5EDT.

Monday: Sick as a dog. My body's immune system isn't handling the jet lag or running myself into the ground very well. They sent me home from work this afternoon so I could rest and hopefully not get everyone sick. Wound up sleeping until 1600 EST5EDT, when Lyssa came home and woke me up.

I'll write a real post tomorrow.

We're back online!

Saturday 08 December 2007 at 3:52 pm Firewall flaming out on Thursday afternoon: $2000us
Trying to talk Lyssa and Laurelinde through reconfiguring the wireless access point to act as a temporary firewall over the phone: $21us on the phone bill for roaming charges
Pentium-3 @ 1GHz and 20GB of disk space: $0us, scavenged from a dumpster
Copy of OpenBSD: $0us by downloading it from the site
Brand new firewall for the Network: Priceless

Irony of ironies.

Wednesday 05 December 2007 at 09:49 am Coffee at 0500 in your hotel room: When you need it the most, you are least capable of successfully making it.

Coming to you very much live and direct (though undercaffeinated), this is the Doctor.

Monday 03 December 2007 at 06:33 am I've been sent on the road again for work, this time to the west coast, and the lovely region of California called Palo Alto. It's 0606 EST as I begin writing this from my increasingly infirm partner in crime Windbringer from one of the Z gates of Dulles International. Security was a nightmare this morning - not only does everyone and their backup seem to be hitting the friendly skies this morning, but the physical security detail seems to have changed its strategies once again. Now they are inspecting boarding passes and presented identification with both ultraviolet lamps and magnifying monocles hanging from lanyards. I don't know what they're expecting to find but it backed the security queue up around the corner and resulted in a one hour wait in line. Maybe my last few trips out have spoiled me, or at least raised my expectations to an unreasonable degree.

Just attempting to enter the terminal was a chore in itself - they've powered down a random selection of automatic doors (in particular, those belonging to my airline) to force travelers to hike and slalom down the sidewalk in an attempt to find a working gate. Between that and the concrete barriers all over the place, one would suppose that they're hoping to prevent a mad bomber from filling a car with explosives and ramming the building. There's just one problem with this particular threat model: Terrorism as a concept doesn't particularly care how they go about the task at hand so long as maximum damage to property and loss of life are achieved. A particularly selfless and dedicated suicide bomber could accomplish precisely the same effect by loading him- or herself up with explosives beneath clothing (especially at this time of year, when everyone's wearing heavy clothing for warmth), making his or her way to the front of a packed security queue (like this morning's), and detonating the bomb. Sure, you probably wouldn't get to see the whole facade outside go up in smoke but the terminal where several hundred to several thousand people would be in range of the blast would be utterly destroyed, and all those people would be killed at best, maimed for life at worst by the heat, blast wave, and shrapnel.

As JFK was reputed to have said, "If they're going to get you, they're going to get you."

In other news, Saturday night was another fun-filled night at Spellbound with Lyssa, Laurelinde, Hasufin, Mika, and Cindy. We got dressed up in our finest dancing clothes and joined the older contingent of the DC goth scene for a fun-filled night of movies on the big screens (BIg Trouble In Little China, Buckaroo Banzai, and Escape From New York (as opposed to Escape From CMU)), music that didn't take itself seriously, and good friends. After last week I wasn't much in the mood to cut a rug, so I wound up hanging out with Tom Rhodes at the bar sipping hard cider and catching up on the past couple of years. We talked for a couple of hours about old friends, people we knew, and the crazy stuff that happens when you get a bunch of bored geeks together on a Friday night. I wound up on the dance floor about half an hour before we left, which pretty much wiped me out. I don't know what was up with me that night, I think I was just road weary even though the prospect of going dancing was one of two things that kept me going all last week.

On Sunday, Lyssa, Laurelinde, and I slept in and then headed to Amphora for a late breakfast. While they got ready I jumped out to Micro Center to pick up a PCMCIA USB v2.0 interface for Windbringer to get us through until I can spec out a replacement for him. After some thought I decided to pick up a new laptop rather than buy a replacement motherboard for Windbringer because ultimately an upgrade would win out over a lateral replacement move. If you're going to do it, do it right, right?

It figures that this would happen after I get William Gibson to autograph my laptop. Foo.

After breakfast we drove out to the House of Leaves, homestead of Laurelinde and company, and spent the afternoon and evening hanging out with the family, working on our pet projects, eating Chinese food, and watching football (or at least allowing it to provide background noise). A simple, yet fun way to spend a rainy, cold, nasty Sunday. Lyssa and I got home around 2330 EST on Sunday, and she went to bed early while I tried to gear myself down to actually get some sleep, a couple of fleeting hours of vague dreams, tossing, turning, and wishing that I could drop my brain down into low power consumption mode. 0330 EST came around far too rapidly, though Mika was nice enough to drive me to the airport at 0-dark-thirty and bring coffee.

Some days, vamping and flirting with the securicams are the only thing that make it all worth it.

Brass Goggles is still offline following the compromise of some number of systems at the web hosting provider it's based out of.

I really hope that I took care of everything that I had to take care of while I was at home this weekend. It's a nagging feeling that I haven't been able to shake just yet.