Saturday, 06 January 2007 at 21:12
1128 EST/EDT. Lyssa and I made it into Cleveland, Ohio around 0155 EST/EDT this morning (five minutes within projected arrival time!) The Ferrett is running a
Doctor Who marathon today, and Lyssa and I made the long drive to Ohio from DC to join everyone. Some of us have been fans for a while, some of us are new to the series (like Ian, sitting on the floor across the room watching
Rose from season 27).
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.. I left work early yesterday afternoon so that I could pick up my car at the garage. The work was finished, really, the final inspections had to be done before they could release it, but the catch was that after the vehicle was ready, I had only 24 hours to return my rental car and pick it up at the garage/rental agency. Annoying, becuase I was supposed to drive out here last night...
So I made a couple of calls over lunch and managed to bump up the inspection a few hours. End result: The TARDIS is ready for pickup at 1730 EST/EDT. Somehow I managed to make it both there and back home on the beltway in decent time, which is no mean feat for a Friday in DC, and then ran home to throw clothes into a suitcase to hit to road.
After loading everything up, I took a moment out to make a couple of last minute modifications to my car's electrical system to make the trip easier on everyone, and then Lyssa and I set out.
Or started to, at any rate. We stopped off for dinner at the local deli; I had to run home to pick up the power inverter so that we could plug our phones in to recharge on the trip, and made it back in time to eat before my meal got cold. The actual trip took about seven hours, counting two stop offs to stretch our legs and get coffee. Not bad for crossing three states on the turnpike, I think...
Gotta go -
An Unearthly Child is on.
Friday, 05 January 2007 at 21:16
Today's the fifth of January - the TARDIS is supposed to be ready at the body shop by now. Cross your fingers, everyone.
thunderbird -ProfileManager - For when you absolutely, positively have to do things to your e-mail configuration that would make any sane system administrator (hush, you!) cringe.
More under the cut...
Thursday, 04 January 2007 at 21:19
As part of my New Year's resolution to get in better shape I've started to work out twice a week, and discovered once again that my body isn't as young as I wish it was. It's been two days now, and most of the major muscle groups are firing off error messages as fast as they possibly can because they've put in a lot more duty time than they're accustomed to doing for a professional geek. I still can't walk without pain for long periods of time, and let me tell you, maneuvering in this state with a rather heavy backpack isn't so much fun, either. I'm starting to feel like an old man, and rather wish I'd thought to bring one of my walking sticks to help get around DC.
In hindsight, the sixteen-block hike yesterday morning to and from an office that I had an appointment at probably didn't help any. For the record, that's eight blocks each way - DC is not a small place, and not everything is within spitting distance. Unfortunately, it would have been just as much of a walk to get to the building that had a shuttle-bus to the office I was headed for, so it wound up being an either/or situation.
More under the cut...
Wednesday, 03 January 2007 at 21:25
Here's a cloud to find a silver lining in -
research into technically nonlethal virobiological weapons. Technically - known side effects were coma and death from brain swelling, but at least some of the time the usual effects were similiar to that of a bad case of the flu. This research never got off the ground because of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention of 1972, but serious work was still done at the time.
From the information security community to the end-users at home: Just like the hard drives you're getting rid of,
wipe your solid state storage media before you get rid of it, because data can be extracted from it most of the time, and some of it you might not want getting out (like your financial records, in a couple of the examples in the article).
If you've been keeping an eye on politics in the DC area, you've probably heard word of Keith Ellison, the first Muslim elected to the US Congress, and all the hullabaloo therof, from his being accused of being a threat to American values by Virgil Goode, who embarasses my now-home state of Virginia with his words, to much nastier things coming from people with perpetually sunburned necks and meshback ballcaps. This should bake quite a few noodles, then: Ellison will swear his oath of office...
on a copy of the Koran that was owned by Thomas Jefferson, on loan from the Library of Congress.
Tuesday, 02 January 2007 at 21:33
Wait a minute...
ex-president Gerald Ford died?!
Lyssa pointed me at an article that brought up something that never occurred to me -
how libraries manage the limited amount of space they have for all of their materials. This is to say, they keep track of how often each book is checked out (much easier to do since card catalogues and patron records went digital in the mid 1990's) and if it isn't touched for longer than a certain time, they either throw the books out (dumpster diving at the local library is how I got most of my books when I was a kid) or put them up for sale during the yearly fundraisers. At the very least, there is a chance that someone will buy a copy and keep it, which keeps the information inside the text available in some fashion, but a lot of books get thrown in the trash and are lost. When you think about how rare (or how expensive) some books are, this is a painful waste. I think this would be an ideal place for e-books to fit into the informational ecosystem - in the same physical space taken up by a hardback textbook, you can fit about a dozen DVD-ROM disks containing several thousand texts in .pdf, .chm, or .html format apiece.
More under the cut...
Monday, 01 January 2007 at 21:40
That's what I'd like to see, in my slightly inhebriated state! More spammers getting vasectomies!
Which Website are You?
Well, it's the first day of 2007. Somehow, we all survived another year, a little bit older, a little bit wiser, and a little bit more jaded. The point is, though, that we made it.
More under the cut...
Saturday, 30 December 2006 at 21:56
The down-low on Hussein's execution.
My new USB audio recorder rocks all known sheep. I'm currently recording the third tape of.. who knows.. and the damage done to the tapes from listening to them so much over the years aside, the recordings are very clear and clean.
Well, there are slightly more than twenty-four hours left in the year 2006 of the common era, and I am still figuring out what in the hell happened to my vacation.
More under the cut...
Friday, 29 December 2006 at 22:04
Wow.. are there only three days left in 2006?? It feels like time's been flying by faster than even the most sensitive of clocks can account for.
Lyssa and I have been back in DC for about two days now, and it's been a hell of a vacation thus far. On the 26th, while we were still in Pennsylvania, Lyssa spent some time at home with a friend of hers while I trekked back to Pittsburgh to see my family some more, and catch up with some close friends thereof who have gone above and beyond the call of duty. Unfortunately, this sort of messed with the plans I already had set out but there isn't much that can be done about that when it comes to folks helping out when they really don't have to. That afternoon I spent the afternoon with Chuck, Judy, and John (Judy's son). The family and I headed over to celebrate Yule a day after the fact and hang out, a day which turned into an afternoon of munching on leftovers, re-burning CDs that didn't take quite right, and catching up on everything going on back home. We got back around 1700 EST/EDT that day, and my mother and I spent some time in the basement, my old laboratory, cleaning stuff up, throwing stuff out, and digging out some stuff to bring back to DC with me.
Since Lyssa got me that USB audio recorder, I've been planning on converting my collection of audiocassettes (which numbers in the high triple digits from my days as a DJ) into .mp3 files for archival, so that I can get rid of most of them to free up space in my apartment as well as in my folks' house. This would also mean that I could listen to them more (at all, really) by loading them into my iPod. To that end, I picked out a couple of score of tapes, disconnected the dual-slot high-quality tape deck from my PA rig, and loaded the whole lot into the trunk of my TARDIS for the trek back to DC.
More under the cut...
Wednesday, 27 December 2006 at 22:05
Back in DC, safe and sound and dead tired.
Congratulations to John Barrowman and Scott Gill,
who were wedded in a civil ceremony this morning. Barrowman and Gill have been together for sixteen years and are still going strong.
Monday, 25 December 2006 at 22:10
James Brown, requisat en pace When I get home, I'll play some good, old fashioned
LA Style
in your memory, because it was That Song, the first track of
Best of Rave volume one that got me listening to you after all.
Lyssa and I got up around 0800 EST/EDT, when our circadian rhythms had decided that we'd gotten enough sleep, and got ourselves going for the long haul back to Pittsburgh to visit my family. Lyssa's father had gone to the nursing home to visit Grandma Pat before we'd awakened, so we waited for a while until everyone was up and around and then exchanged gifts. Lyssa got a new digital camera, a new crockpot, and a Joy of Tea Collection for her headline gifts, while I got
the Doctor Who season 27/1 boxed set, and a new jumper and pair of jeans (which I'm wearing right now).
More under the cut...
Sunday, 24 December 2006 at 22:17
It's been an interesting trip back to Pennsylvania, to say the very least. Lyssa and I finally got the TARDIS loaded up and set course for Pittsburgh around 1130 EST/EDT yesterday morning, stopped off for a quick lunch at the local deli, and then headed for the northbound beltway for the long haul.
I'm very glad that I was able to talk Lyssa out of driving home on Friday night because driving conditions were so bad in the DC area. Between the rain, the darkness, and all the headlights of people trying to do last minute shopping it really wasn't worth going out on Friday night. On our dinner and errand running jaunt on Friday, we had a hell of a time just getting anywhere safely, let alone in a timely manner.
Traffic on route 270-north was pretty bad yesterday, in the form of stop and go and stop once again patterns from the beltway onward. Many travelers were probably running late and impatient to get to their destinations, and it showed.
More under the cut...
Saturday, 23 December 2006 at 22:20
One Todd Shriber, age 28, press aide to US Representative Denny Rehberg,
tried to hire a couple of hackers to edit his college transcript so that he'd look like a better student. The thing is,
he e-mailed the guys at attrition.org, who have having a field day with this.
Friday, 22 December 2006 at 22:34
An old chewing gum commercial says "Double your pleasure, double your fun," but I don't think this is exactly what they had in mind.. one hannah Kersey, age 23 from the UK have birth to triplets.
Triplets carried to term in her two uterii. I'm not pulling your leg, folks, she really does have two wombs. The three girls (two identical twins, and an odd one out) were born by cesarian section seven weeks early.
Does anyone out there have a USB scanner that I can borrow? Mine just died in the middle of something important...
More under the cut...
Thursday, 21 December 2006 at 00:00
I got it!!
Thread pools!
Here's something you don't see every day, but I sincerely hope will become common in the next couple of years:
Books On Demand, both a principle and the name of a company (well, it's called On Demand Books, actually... I tried) that manufactures automatic printing press/bindaries. Their first model, called the Espresso Book Machine, costs $50kus, but can print, cut, trim, bind, and fit into a laminated cover two books simultaneously inside of seven wallclock minutes, or 15-20 library quality books per hour. There are two in public right now, one at the World Bank Infoshop in my home town of Washington, DC, and one at the public Library of Alexandria, Egypt (make what jokes you will). The cost of a single paperback book is about $0.01us per page. They are at this time working on setting up a digital library of texts that can be freely printed and purchased by anyone who uses an Espresso Book Machine in just about any format and with respect to copyright laws. They don't say, however, if you can walk up and print a file on some storage medium you happen to have with you, though...
I'm going to track down the World Bank Infoshop and see what it's all about.
Wednesday, 20 December 2006 at 00:00
It seems that Google has changed its mind about one of their more famous open projects, namely, allowing web developers to use the SOAP protocol to pull data from their network.
They've quietly killed the Search SOAP project and pulled the developers' kit from the website. Here's the thing: Google's SOAP API is used to teach developers how to integrate other sites' functionality into their own. You might say that it's the gold standard, about which many books have been written (well, all of them, actually). An open source project called
EvilAPI has arisen to provide continued accessbut it's anyone's guess as to whether or not it'll work for long. Rumours are already going around that IP addresses that scrape data from the Google net (rather than pull it using the AJAX search API) are getting banned.
Why not use the AJAX search API? First, it'll take time for people to figure out how to use it and document everything. Second, it has only a fraction of the features of the SOAP API. Third, the AJAX API places unreasonable search limits (only eight hits per query). Your average Google search returns an order of magnitude more than that.
This can't be good.
They started filming a remake of WarGames.
More under the cut...
Tuesday, 19 December 2006 at 00:00
See you next time, Crusher.
Last night Lyssa, Orthaevelve, and I decided to go out to dinner to celebrate things looking up at work these days after work. It was something of a snap decision, you see - I got a call from my boss while I was at the Metro station headed for home, and immediately told Lyssa as soon as she arrived. After going to the doctor's office so that she could get her weekly allergy inoculation, we called up Orthaevelve and asked about the wherabouts of any good Chinese restaurants in the area. Much to our surprise, there was one within a comfortable driving distance.. I wish that I'd thought to pick up a menu while I was there becaue I don't remember the name of the restaurant off the top of my head. The food there is excellent, easily the best Chinese I've had since leaving Pittsburgh. The pot-stickers were tasty, even without dipping sauce; the egg rolls were to die for, Lyssa tells me; the egg drop soup is well worth the trip; let me tell you, the General T'sao's Chicken was amazing. The portions are a little on the generous side, so if you've got the option to order the small of each dish, use it. Prices are decent, about $13us per person for dinner.
Overall verdict: One and a half flareguns, name of restaurant to come.
EDIT: The name of the restaurant is China Star (9600 G Main Street; Fairfax, Virginia, 22031; phone number 703-393-8822).
More under the cut...
Wednesday, 25 October 2006 at 22:25
I was wrong, things can get more weird. Malware researcher Joe Stewart has been working on a new infective agent called SpamThru, and discovered some very unusual things about it:
It goes to incredible lengths to ensure that it is the only infection on the machine in question, namely, it downloads and installs a pirated copy of Kaspersky Antivirus, hacks it so that it doesn't check for a valid license key, and scans the infected machine to get rid of every other piece of malware that isn't SpamThru. Control of zombied machines is done with a peer-to-peer protocol that can replace the central server in case it is ever discovered and shut down.
Wednesday, 25 October 2006 at 22:23
Counterfit Cisco hardware??
