Much to my surprise tonight, I got a call from John and Lara to go out and celebrate John's new job and my own change of employment. After a quick conference I dropped my gear off at the Garden and swung out to pick up a USB hub for Kabuki-sama as well as a new pair of headphones. I briefly browsed the USB mice (because using a touchpad and a full-sized PC keyboard is awkward at best) but didn't find anything I felt like dropping $20us on. My next stop was a Chinese restaurant near downtown where they were already waiting, along with Aaron and Allyson from the Tekkoshocon staff. We swiftly filled the table with many good things to eat (though this place seems curiously loath to let people have chopsticks) and spent several hours sitting, talking, laughing, and catching up.
Tonight was one of my nights to pretend that I actually have a personality of some kind. They don't happen very often, and when they do they're not really the best of ideas, but for some reason I don't think that they seemed to mind too much.
After dinner (and much figuring of the bill, because it had not been divided up as it should have been) we hiked down the block to a local coffee shoppe (not Starbucks, thank the gods) to spend yet more time scaring the greyfaces and drinking far too much coffee. More good laughs were had.
The Transgender Day of Rememberance will be held on Sunday, 21 November 2004 at Saint Andrew's Lutheran Church, 204 Morewood Avenue, Pittsburgh. For more information, contact emilial (at) glccpgh dot friggin-spammers dot org.
Aww.... My Little Pony of Borg!
November 2004 is World ASCII Month! Break out your old-school t-files and re-live the good old days.
Today was my last day at the County. The morning was spent buttoning up everything left to do, clearing out my e-mail box, checking a few web apps, and waiting for the final tasks, which were an on-site test and the exit interview, which consisted of my making sure that I'd given back everything to give back and erased everything work-related from my pocket computer. The on-site test wound up being a bust because the installation CDs were were going to use for the test were bad; specifically, the first CD-ROM in the set (the bootable one) wouldn't go into installation mode no matter what we tried. Test failed. Ick.
The guys at the office took me to Applebee's for lunch today. After all this time, I finally had the chance to hang out and do the bonding thing with everyone. Ironic that it was my last day... on the whole, however, it was a good time and a good lunch. We got to sit and talk for once, really talk about what's been going on. My leaving is throwing a lot of plans (mandatory and not) into a tizzy, and I feel kind of bad about that. I never meant to be such a disruption. But, life goes on, and after a few days the ripples will smooth themselves out. I haven't burned any bridges, and I'm still in contact with some folks.
I made my rounds and said my good-byes to everyone, then picked up the rest of my stuff and headed to my boss' office for the final checkout. We deleted everything from my pocket computer and worked on one or two last glitches, and then headed out into history.
I even got out early for once.
Secretive and wise, the Mekhet are masters of all
things hidden. They hunt from the shadows,
preying secretly on victims and unlocking
secrets that no one should know. The only
common thread linking Mekhet is an affinity for
the night itself or some metaphorical darkness,
such as a pained soul or a thirst for
knowledge. Mekhet are tutored intensely by
their sires so that they understand the nature
of the clan and its duties. Some prefer to let
their progeny discover the Kindred world on
their own, but not even these sires stray so
far that they cant watch a protgs progress.
What Vampire: the Requiem Vampire clan are you?
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Ummm.. yeah.
And the hits just keep on comin'... election officials in the state of Ohio have discovered 2,600 votes were double-counted in the presidential election. In other locations, a small number of people actually did manage to cast two or more votes in the same area. No one noticed the discrepancies until it was discovered that 131% of the registered voters were logged as having cast their ballots. In other news, thousands of provisional votes cast in the state of Illinois are being disregarded because they're not sure if the people who cast them or not are registered to vote. How about actually checking, guys???
Will somebody please explain to me exactly what kind of system glitch is capable of placing the silhouette of a 'weapon' on a monitor screen, thus causing four sectors fo the Miami, Florida airport to go into lockdown? Just a couple of days ago a number of planes were evacuated and four concourses had to be cleared because a baggage screening device (basically a computerised x-ray scanner) accidentally flagged the carry-on baggage of one Edward Skine as containing a hand grenade-like device. After 90 minutes, during which the unsuspecting Mr. Skine had gone to the food court for a bite to eat, he was apprehended by internal security, searched, sniffed by bomb detecting dogs, and when they found that he wasn't carrying a weapon he was thrown out of the airport without so much as a "We're sorry."
They screw up, and the screwee gets the blame?
So much for not having to worry if you didn't do anything...
As if that wasn't enough to get your blood pressure up, the fast-food chain Hardees has revealed its latest creation: The Thickburger. The thickburger consists of 2/3 pound of ground beef, three slices of bread, four strips of fried bacon, cheese, mayo, and butter. It tips the scales at 1,420 dietary calories (and the cash register at $5.49us). I wonder if they keep defibrillators in the restaurants to jumpstart patrons suddenly taken with cardiac arrest...
Welcome to the University of Delaware, where the victim is always guilty of underage drinking or drug abuse.
It probably won't do any good to do so (none of the petitions circulated thus far have had any positive effect) but there's another one in the works that hopes to tell Congress that overtime pay is a good thing, and often is the only thing that makes ends meet. John Hancock it and click the 'confirm' button before it's your paycheque that gets chopped.
I need new socks. I've steadily worn out about half my available pairs.
Bioengineered crops may not be as safe as the corporations say they are, says a new study published in a peer-review journal called Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering Reviews. A number of serious shortcomings have been found in the safety testing methodologies employed by biotechnology firms in the US, which, when coupled with the growing numbers of people who are showing allergic reactions to bioengineered crops, casts a shadow of doubt upon how safe they say crops grown from these seeds are. Copies of the article are available from this net.location, thought not at an easily affordable price (192.00 euro). So much for the little guy getting hold of this paper, unless there's a hardcopy of the journal in a college reference library someplace that someone wouldn't mind scanning and uploading. However, one could e-mail one of the authors of this paper
- David Schubert (schubert (at) salk dot railgun dot edu)
- William Freese (billfreese (at) reality-television prodigy dot net)
- Geert Ritsema (geert dot ritsema (at) tactical-nuke foeeurope dot org)
- Juan Lopez (juan dot lopez (at) foeeurope dot fuel-air-explosive org)
- Clare Oxborrow (media (at) foe dot genetically-engineered-plague dot co dot uk)
..if one were so inclined.
Like Iraq, there are no weapons of mass destruction in the e-mail addresses above.
A death metal band fronted by a parrot?!?
This has to be one of the most bad-assed attempts to smuggle anything, ever: Peruvian law enforcement confiscated 700 kg of cocaine hidden in 25 tonnes of giant squid en route to the United States and Mexico. That's right - a giant squid. The drugs were wrapped in plastic and doused with liberal amounts of pepper in an attempt to throw off drug sniffing dogs that routinely examine shipments from South America.
My japanese name is 坂本 Sakamoto (book of the hill) 誠 Makoto (sincerity).
Take your real japanese name generator! today!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.
To everyone who has been getting a password dialogue box whenever they open this page, pointed at http://home.midsouth.rr.com/: I think it's because something I linked to a while ago is now either taken down or has been redirected to something that is now protected. I don't know what it is. It'll probably go away when I archive the older entries.
Patrick Volkerding of Slackware Linux is in a very bad way. He's been suffering from a chest infection for the past couple of years that hasn't been diagnosed properly, but now it's been figured out - actinomycosis. I don't have time tonight to write everything up (too much going on) but check out his post, which I've linked abouve. I'm going to be slinging some mojo his way soon to try to help him out (anyone with me?); he's done a lot for the Linux community, and I'd like to try to help him out for a change.
Four days and counting. My boss and I are going to be spending a lot of time going over my basic duties, as well as exactly how they're done, what I usually run into, and what has to be documented someplace (the 'weird shit' file). This could be described best as a controlled frenzy of activity, as everything that hasn't been getting done now has to be completed one way or another before the end of the week.
And on top of that, I had to write up other folks' messes today. One would think that memos coming down from on high mean that a) there is a problem, and b) this problem has to be taken care of ASAP. For some reason, however, what we normally consider an emergency isn't considered thus elsewhere. This must be that new management technique I've been hearing everyone talking about...
<sigh>
I hauled the filing cabinet that I bought yesterday into my bedroom and set it up next to the dresser. I now have quite the appreciation for what the natives of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) went through when they were erecting the moai centuries ago. I managed to walk the filing cabinet by rocking it back and forth for the better part of an hour across the carpet, through the kitchenette, into my bedroom, around the Children, and over next to the balcony and the chest of drawers. All told, the sucker weighs a good sixty to seventy-five pounds, and is made of solid steel. Lupa and I nearly killed ourselves hauling it into the Garden yesterday, and moving it alone wasn't much more fun. At least I have now gotten all of my financial stuff off of the floor and into a reasonably safe place.
Speaking of financial stuff, I took the plunge today. Months ago, as I was lamenting Kabuki-sama's crankiness and slow decline to Dataline, she made me a deal: We'd go half-and-half on a new laptop in the future, no questions asked. I've been doing research off and on ever since then, checking out various notebook computers for weight, power usage, warranty, and most importantly Linux compatibility. Eventually I returned to Dell's website and discovered that they were running a special today (well, since last Monday, anyway) on notebook computers: 15% off of some models in their Inspiron line. I eventually settled on an Inspiron 700m and began to trick it out with everything I need for both work and play. When it was all said and done, I had a 4.1 pound (whew!) notebook with a widescreen display (I don't do much movie watching unless I'm at a party and showing videos or screensavers), a 1.6 GHz processor core, DVD/CD-RW combo drive, 768 MB of SDRAM and an internal 802.11B/G waveLAN module. I did some poking around before ordering and discovered that people have had a lot of luck with both Fedora Core and FreeBSD, which sealed the deal for me. A quick phone call later, and Dell's "pay with two credit cards" option sealed the deal. I should have my new deck by next week.
I don't know what I'm going to name her yet. I just have a feeling that it's going to be a 'her'.
I think I'm going to sleep on it tonight. I've got an idea.
Every other song on SLAY Radio tonight is a cover of Delta. Enough is enough.
I am terrifyingly evil! Find your soul type at kelly.moranweb.com.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Are we returning to the Dark Ages?
I haven't really felt like writing this weekend. Not because nothing worth thinking in text about has happened - stuff has happened. I just haven't felt like putting the effort forth. Maybe I'm just tired; maybe I've got more pressing things to think about right now. In the end, it really doesn't matter because the result's the same.
This has been a slow weekend. Nothing really has been happening. Lupa and I hung out and ate pizza last night, and today we roamed around the malls and stores to see what we could see. Mostly, I've spent the weekend laying around reading, flexing and exercising my mind to take my mind off of stress and trying to get stuff done and lined up.
I finally bought a filing cabinet.
The weather's turning cold so my wrists and hands are bothering me more than usual. That's been a part of what's been keeping me offline this weekend.
I finally balanced my chequebook this month. Ick. I hate the holidays.
Last night had had me tied up in knots for the past few days. I had been invited to go out with some old friends and to see someone who'd moved out of the country a couple of years back after her marriage.
For various reasons, I'd lost contact with everyone, reasons that I really do not want to go into simply because I hate drama, and go out of my way to avoid it (even though drama is the core cause of this whole clusterfuck). Because I was unable to speak to anyone, the only conclusion I could draw from my limited information was that most everyone had turned their backs on me and refused to have anything to do with me.
It turns out that it was probably an e-mail that wasn't read that caused all of this.
Anyway, we spent an evening at a local bar hanging out. Because I drove, I had to pass on drinking, but I did get a chance to have a steaming hot hamburger (right off the grille), french fries, and provolone sticks for dinner, and blew the mind of the woman working behind the bar by not only being polite but leaving her a tip.
Why did I make such a big deal out a burger? I don't know. There's something about getting the sucker right off the grille not ten feet away and going to town on it while steam's still coming off of it. I also rarely eat junk food, saving it for special occasions (like seeing Cath again).
Anyway, we sat and talked and caught up on life last night. I don't much like bars (I'd rather drink in places where I don't have to read lips to hold a conversation) so we parted ways early last night, and I headed home to relax a little after a day of writing lots and lots and lots of documentation.
This morning I got up and went through my usual "it's the weekend and I don't have to do a bloody thing routine", culminating in heading out for a while to nose around the local mall. I picked up some needle files from Hack Shack to shape the ring blanks I'm going to play around with this weekend, some more neutral-coloured Sculpey to test with (so I don't use up all the Sculpey that I've set aside for the finished versions), and some pencils because I'm in a mood to do some sketching. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to find a pack of pencils - just plain pencils - when the stores are in a rush to get Christmas displays set up. Ye flipping gods. I also went in search of blank t-shirts to make some of the ones I've been planning, but couldn't find those, either. Cold weather has a way of making people put them away for a few months, I guess.
Rap artist Ol' Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan, rest in peace. ODB fied earlier today in the recording studio after complaining of chest pain.
| You Are From Neptune |
 You are dreamy and mystical, with a natural psychic ability. You love music, poetry, dance, and (most of all) the open sea. Your soul is filled with possibilities, and your heart overflows with compassion. You can be in a room full of friendly people and feel all alone. If you don't get carried away with one idea, your spiritual nature will see you through anything. |
Okay, so I will post for today...
I just finished watching VH1's episode of Bands Reunited featuring Information Society. I've got a few things to say about this, but not right now.
I did, however, find pictures from Kurt's wedding.
Wow. Get these two to a gothic lolita photoshoot at Tekkoshocon, please.
Happy Veteran's Day, everyone.
Today's a County holiday, so I've been kicking around relaxing and generally having a good time. I managed to sleep in today, even though I didn't really have a restful night for various reasons, I woke up feeling better than I have for a few days now. After a shower and breakfast (and forgetting to spice the eggs - where was my head?) I settled down to read a little, and stumbled across a curiously synchronistic passage in the latest issue of David Mack's Kabuki: Alchemy. The universe tends to drop subtle hints, and over the years I've learned to pay attention to them. I took the hint and began Working.
I think I've managed to get the patch in place. I've got a good feeling about this.
Afterward, I shook myself off and headed out to wander a little, and pick up some groceries for the end of the week. I also picked up some stuff to work on the ring prototypes (for next Tekkoshocon, I'm doing Utena, so I need to make a Rose Crest signet ring) and fix my leather trenchcoat (for such a nice coat, you'd think they'd sew the buttons on properly). I picked up a few clay carving tools to make the signet, and some silk thread to reinforce the band, because I don't know exactly how strong baked Sculpy is. I also wandered down to the local pet store to see what they had.
I've had it in my head for a while to get some bettas (siamese fighting fish) for the Garden. I've heard good things about them, and I find them incredibly beautiful to watch. As neat as sea monkeys/brine shrimp are, it's nice to have some colour, too. The local pet store has soem beautiful ones in stock. Healthy, too. I picked up a tank and some dividers for it, because bettas are notorious for attacking one another if they're in the same open space. They're beautiful, but they're also vicious. I'm going to wait and do some research on bettas before I take the plunge and buy them. I'd also like to set the tank up and let it sit for a while, to clean the water up. After a few days, I'll go back and get them.
They had hermit crabs, too, but they were very small. They were more to show off their painted shells than anything else. The shells themselves weren't anything to write home about, either.
They have a beautiful lionfish there, about the size of a coffee cup. The spines were long and flowed beautifully. Excellent care is being taken of it. Saltwater fish are tricky to keep, and are rather expensive, so I only window shopped.
I finally fixed my trenchcoat tonight. The super-strong thread I picked up earlier today did an excellent job of putting the buttons back on. For some weird reason, I can't seem to sew through the lining of said coat to save my lives. The buttons are on and they're as securely attached as I can make them, but the lining is shifted in their direction, which makes it hang unevenly. You can't see it because the lining's zipped in place and it doesn't impact the coat in any way save cosmetically, but I still know it's there. It fits perfectly once more, so I'm happy with the job I did.
I also worked a little on propmaking for next year. If I don't start now, I won't get anywhere - I know me too well.
I did some prototyping of ring components (a basic, flat band, and a number of signets) to make a Rose Crest ring out of Sculpey. In playing around, I've come to a few conclusions. Sculpey is good to work with, but it doesn't roll out well on a plastic surface, let alone a textured one. I'm going to have to find a glass or wooden one to get it to roll out properly. Using a hand-roller to make even sheets of Sculpey is harder than it looks, and makes the surfaces of the shapes uneven. I might have to buy or borrow a pasta roller (also available at the craft store) to do this for me. Carving the rose sigil into soft Sculpey can be done, but is tricky. Using a finely pointed tool works well, but the excess Sculpey that gets picked up can distort the surrouding material, and if you don't get it up, it makes the design look messy. When I made the prototype signets, I left a few of them uncarved to see how they'd turn out. They turned out much the same as everything else did. I'd like to try carving the hardened signets with a sharp tool of some kind to see how well it works. If it's cleaner and easier to do, I'll go with that method.
The band turned out pretty well for what it was, which was a hastily wrapped strip of Sculpey pressed together for a proof of concept. It doesn't really fit any of my fingers; it barely fits on my left pinky. For a proof of concept, however, it's okay. To make prop rings, it'll work as long as I have something stable to shape it around. The dowel I used, however, doesn't work. I might have to pick up a mandril someplace. The other idea I had was to make a solid ring blank (similiar to the high-density wax ring blanks used for making centripital casting molds) out of Sculpey, bake it hard, and then go to town on it with small files and burins. I think it'll work well, but it could also be time consuming. There's also the problem with not being able to use pink Sculpey to make the signet (to be detailed in black) - it would probably wind up silver, and would have to be painted.
That's an attempt for another day, though.
A sixth-octave E-sharp on a tenor sax sounds like the EKG of someone who's just flatlined. Ugh.
Today was another rough one. I got a panic call shortly after 0900 EST and spent much of the day nursing a sick server back to health. Poor thing had an upset file system. It's not good to hoard that much data when it's not being used.
The remainder of the day was spent testing out procedures that hadn't been run through yet on a spare machine and writing down exactly what has to be done. This is referred to as a brain dump, and basically means that the person leaving has to take all of their accumulated knowledge about foo, test it out, and either sweat it into documentation for later reference or teach it to everyone that upper management can find. It's been the former for most of this week, and probably most of next week.
You're a dodger?! shirker?! dodging military
service, you little scum!
Which force of Israel Defence Forces would you serve?!
brought to you by Quizilla
I worked some more on my saxophone technique tonight. I'm rediscovering how difficult it is to hit all of the low notes (first and second octave). I wasn't very good at them when I was playing regularly (I became quite skilled at transposing the harder octaves into the upper registers on the fly so as not to wreck the song) but that's something I want to fix. I found a good page of fingerings that I was using to practise from. Nothing terribly interesting, I'm afraid, I was just running scales to re-learn the fingerings and practise my articulation. On the up-side, I now know how to use more of the oddly placed keys on my sax (we didn't make it that far), though the very highest notes are going to take a lot more work. I think it'll take another week or so of working on fingerings and scales before I'll have enough body-knowledge back to actually play something.
I'm torn between going back to track down some of my old practise books and diving right in to figure a few songs out. I'm sorely tempted to work out the melodies to some Iris songs, or maybe parts of the Shojo Kakkumei Utena soundtrack.
I wonder if I can still play by ear.
I need to get staff paper.
Winter's coming. I think we had our first frost early this morning.
Holy shit - InSoc reunited on VH1!
And I don't have cable at the Garden.
Shoot me. Just shoot me now. A gothic/industrial boyband?
Yes, I know this is satire. It still hurts my brain.
In Austin, TX public schools' textbooks are being altered and given to students. The alterations made deal wtih, it should be noted, lifestyle decisions of a highly personal nature. The textbooks teach abstinence only (as if that's ever worked; knowledge of the risks has historically been a better mtechnique to keep high school kids from doing something stupid) and define marriage as being between a man and a woman only, leaving the rest of us out in the cold. No effort is made in the books to educate kids about STDs and how not to get them. The use of neutral language when referring to partnerships was taken to tacitly condone homosexual relationships, which they are interpreting to be against Texas state law. Only one of the fourteen members of the Texas Board of Education voted against these textbooks.
In other Texas news, pharmacists are refusing to fill prescriptions for birth control pills on moral grounds. Other states in the US are discussing similiar laws.
Is this country slipping back into the dark ages?
Attorney General John Ashcroft and Secretary of Commerce Don Evans resigned from Bush's cabinet today. I'm not sorry to see Ashcroft go; after the USA PATRIOT Act, I'll miss him not at all. I only wish that he'd take that damned Act with him on his way out.
Anyone know if this is legit? Can Johnny Depp compare to Gene Wilder?
The administration building of Warren County, Ohio has gone into lockdown to prevent the observation of the vote count. These orders were given by Frank Young, Emergency Services Director, citing reasons of homeland security. They've shut everyone out, even the media, but as far as I've been able to tell they haven't announced the precise reasons for the lockdown.
In other news, they're waiting for the FBI to arrive in Florida because there appears to be evidence that the election was hacked by people unknown; moreover, this isn't the first time that this has happened. Substantial anomalies have been found in the results of the ballot count, among them the fact that isolated counties in Florida voted substantially differently from surrounding counties. It's not unusual for there to be variation, that's only natural, but so many swinging in the exact opposite direction is statistically odd (though not impossible). These anomalies have been detected only in districts that use optical vote counting hardware. Incidentally, this article explains how easy it is to compromise the votes cast with the electronic voting machines, step by step. Without leaving any tracks in any log files.
Food for thought.
I got to do a little practising on my sax tonight. I spent some time after dinner writing some stuff down that's been kicking around in my head, and doing a little sketching in one of my books. By the time I was ready to play, it was after 2000 EST and counting.
That's something else I'm going to train myself off of - keeping track of time so obsessively. I feel like Kaoru Miki, sometimes.
My hands knew just what to do this evening. I can still put my saxophone together blindfolded, though I didn't try this time. I got this tenor sax well after high school; all those years, we'd been renting an alto, even though I wasn't able to play, and by the time we returned it to the music store to pick a new one (that was the deal we'd made over fifteen years previously - if we'd paid enough for a new one, we could trade it in for a new one) we'd actually paid enough to get a brand-new Yamaha b-flat tenor saxophone.
So that's how I've had a brand new tenor sax in my Lab for eight years, and had barely played it.
Anyway, assembling it gave me a bit of a surprise, because I did it entirely without thinking about it. Procedural memory's hard to damage. I can still remember most of the fingerings for the three major octaves, though some of the specifics still elude me (I can't remember a lot of sharps and flats, but if I can find some of my old books I'll be able to pick them up again). I spent some time tonight just running through scales and fingering patterns, teaching my fingers what they're supposed to do. My hands know what to do, but my cheek muscles are over a decade out of practise. I'm really going to have to get back into keeping a tight seal on the mouthpiece, and not letting my cheeks balloon out (remember Dizzy Gillespie?)
A little at a time. Once I remember the notes, I'll start working on songs.
There's going to be a Quantum Leap movie?! Sweet!
And the discussion's fast and furious on the IMDB message boards as a result.
Today's been another of those 'running solo at the speed of light' days, where I got everything done and then some, and still had spare time to sit around and read manga. Last night John and Lara threw a shindig at their doss with some folks from the Tekkoshocon staff. We wound up sitting around last night talking, eating munchies, playing games (I finally got to play Ninjaburger for once)), and talking. Cosplay Kate announced that she will be the featured cosplayer in the January issue of Newtype Magazine. Kate also helped me identify some of the characters in my AnimeUSA 2004 photo album.
It was a night to relax, or at least try to relax for a change.
Last night we played a game called Encore, which if you've never heard of it is a board game in which being able to recall and sing on demand song lyrics fitting a particular category is the biggest part of the game. I didn't realise this; in fact, I'd never heard of the game before and somehow got pulled into it. I discovered something last night the hard way: I'm afraid to sing around people.
I know that I'm not a very good singer. I've never taken voice training, as far as I can remember. I'm told that I can harmonise decently well, but I can't sing a melody to save my lives, no matter how hard I try. This makes me more than a little self-conscious, but last night I was scared to death to open my mouth. I could only recall bits and pieces of two or three songs, none of them particularly relevant or helpful, and every time I tried to think of their melodies all I could hear was static.
It was like I had a blank tape in my sensory cortex.
I think this is what they call 'stage fright'. It felt strangely familiar for some odd reason.
It bothered me so much that after I left for the Garden, I think I slipped into a minor panic attack. I called Lyssa on the way back and we wound up talking into the wee hours of the morning. Part of me was doing research on the particular sort of neural dysfunctionality I have as a souvenier from years and years ago while the rest of me was talking to Lys trying to figure things out. What she was eventually able to get into my armour-plated skull was that the musical skill I had when I was younger is probably still buried inside my wetware, I just don't remember how to access it. She asked me a few saxophone fingerings, which I was actually able to do, but I wasn't able to identify them until afterward (for example, I can reflexively make a middle-octave G with the fingers of my left hand (left index, middle, and ring ringers in the upper keys) but if you asked me to tell you what they were before telling me to do so, I cannot). The associations are still there, however, as I've just shown. Moreover, I'm not entirely musically dead. I took piano lessons for a few semesters in college, and I passed them near the top of my classes. So, what remains is to re-train myself to play.
I just surprised myself, remembering that.
Tonight Lupa and I stopped by my old Lab to pick up my tenor saxophone. I started to dig out my synthesiser also, but we couldn't find the power supply. I had to leave it there; I'll find it again another day.
I'm going to start practising again. I can remember the practise scales for some weird reason, so I'm going to start running through them to reprogram the motor centers of my brain. I also plan on figuring out the melodies to some songs to get back into the habit of playing by ear. At least right now, I'm not going to be terribly picky about which songs to learn, I'm just going to start learning them to reprogram those parts of my brain, also.
We'll see how things develop on that front.
I'd like to set up my synthesiser again so I can start training my voice. A synth, set to baseline, is theoretically perfectly in tune. Therefore, if I can train my voice to synch with those notes, I'll be able to associate the internal sounds (because one's voice sounds entirely different inside due to how the voice is conducted through the bones of the skull directly into the inner ear, whereas everyone else hears the voice as it passes through the air) and sensations of the larnyx to those notes. Know what I hear it as and what it feels like, know that I've got it right as far as the outside is concerned.
:: how jedi are you? ::
Huh. This is a surprise.
I got my first good workout in a good while this afternoon. I was dripping with sweat by the end of it. I hope to keep it up at least three times a week for a while.
It's amazing what exercise can do for your outlook on life.
Small electric currents can enhance memory?
I'm having one of those me-days.
I was dead tired last night, so I would up not going anywhere, but instead staying at home reading, thinking, making some repairs on Lupa's shoulder, and later on watching the second season of The Big O, which I picked up as a (probably bootlegged) DVD the last time I went to visit Lyssa. The translations for the subtitles are awful. It was only because I set a mental subprocess loose to correct the translations on the fly that I was able to watch it. After talking to Lyssa on the phone for an hour or two later that night, I took myself offline around 0200 EST to sleep.
I must have needed it, because I didn't get up until 1015 EST or so today, feeling fully refreshed and ready to rock and roll. After showering, I took the time to make myself breakfast for the first time in about a month. I take great pleasure in the simple things in life, like cooking, straightening up my Garden, and standing on the balcony once in a while to get some sun and fresh air. It's nice having my own space, and I enjoy it whenever I can. It felt good to sit around eating breakfast and reading. I feel pretty good today. Even my body image isn't bothering me today.
I feel pretty good about life.
I also woke up feeing kind of young today, the way I used to in high school. I wanted to go out and roam for a while, so I put on my fatigues and my skin tight shirt, grabbed a pair of aviators and my war jacket, and headed out to see what I could see. I found a copy of R.Talsorian Games' Cybergeneration at Half Price Books, which I grabbed on impulse. I didn't find too much else there that looked interesting, though their collection of Doctor Who novels has grown by leaps and bounds. They also had two volumes of the concordnances to the new novels, which tie everything together into a cohesive timeline (heh). These I passed on, partially because I tend to gravitate only toward certain novels, and besides that they didn't have the first one, which would logically provide context for the eighth Doctor novels. You have to get stuff like that in order. I don't have much cash on hand, though..
Which doesn't explain why I bought the fourth volume of Tokyo Babylon and the first of Under the Glass Moon (my new addiction) a few minutes later. I never claimed to be consistent.
One of the things I was searching for were some good books on XML, in particular VoiceXML, but aside from the stuff that Borders could special order for me (I don't like doing that because I like to at least flip through the book to get a sense of how useful it'll be to me) they didn't have anything I could use. They had a few basic books on XML but I already have that covered (just have to read those...) After paying for my manga (and the latest issue of 2600 Magazine, I headed out once more, this time to either get groceries or to hang out some more.
I'm good for groceries for a while yet, so I decided to stop by the coffee shoppe that opened about a year ago near my parents' place. It's kind of out of the way but it's got a good atmosphere and good coffee. I spent a while talking with the woman behind the counter, making suggestions for her to bring in some more business. They've got very good coffee, incidentally, and because today was nice and warm and sunny (at least, it was warm about two hours ago - it's gotten a bit chilly since the sun began heading downward, as it's wont to do at this time of year) I sat outside drinking coffee, reading, and talking on the phone to Lyssa.
I've just put up a new photo archive: Samhain 2004. Enjoy!
I'm trying out the rice cooker that Judy gave me with the last of sushi rice. Let's see how this turns out.
I've got the pictures from AnimeUSA 2004 loaded into my webspace but I don't have them available yet because there are too many people whose characters I can't recognise. If you'd like to help me identify them, drop me a line privately and I'll let you know where they are.
It happened today.
I handed in my resignation.
Two weeks from today, I leave my position at the County and move on to Medsage.
It hasn't quite sunk in yet. I still feel like I belong at the county, even though there's little chance that they'll be able to hire me, the paperwork underlying an organisation of that size notwithstanding. Word gets around fast, too. I hadn't expected that. A couple of people today stopped me in the hall to wish me luck. I was hoping to keep it quiet, if not a secret, until a few days before my time there was up, but that didn't happen.
Oh, well. No big deal.
Lately, my boss and I have been trying to meet up for lunch for the first time since I came to the County. We haven't quite been able to do so, however, because he keeps being called out on emergencies in satellite offices. As a result, I have been buying lunch at the deli downstairs lately. Bad for the gut and the pocketbook, I know, but that's how things go, sometimes. Anyway, they keep mistaking me for a biological female. I'm ticked pink by this.
One Saad "Jay" Echouafni is on the FBI's Most Wanted list for orchestrating DDoS attacks that have knocked a number of his competitors' sites flat. Echouafni is accused of hiring crackers to flood the access links of companies competing with his company, Orbit Communications. The attacks he's organised have cost several million US dollars in lost revenue and repairs. After being indicted by the Los Angeles court earlier this year, he went on the lam and is still at large.
Boy, they're really hot to implant chips in people these days.. and I don't mean the kind that can crunch numbers for you while you're reading comic books, either. A company called Verichip (a subsidiary of Applied Digital, not surprisingly) has designed implantable microchips that will unlock 'smart guns' for the designated owner only. The purpose of the chip is to prevent stolen weapons from being used by only allowing someone with a matching RFID microchip implanted in their hand or wrist to fire the weapon. Verichip is planning on marketing them to law enforcement agencies within the next year or so. They've hooked up with the weapons manufacturer FN to produce the business end of the duo. Law enforcement agencies they've approached are leery of rolling out this technology because there are situations in which police officers could conceivably have their hands injured, possibly destroying the chips (and making it impossible to hold or fire these weapons anyway), or having to use the weapons of their partners (not possible due to the lack of a matching chip, though altering the configuration of the smart guns' microprocessors could get around this).
I'd like to know where they got the numbers used to generate these graphs so I can double check their work.
Did Texas get a jump on redefining marriage or what?
Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose. You are a
mystery novel dealing with theology, especially
with catholic vs liberal issues. You search
wisdom and knowledge endlessly, feeling that
learning is essential in life.
Which literature classic are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
I have a lot to say on the presidential election of 2004, but not a lot of time right now to say it. Believe you me, I've got a few choice words, and I get a bad feeling from what's been going down. Unfortunately, I don't have the time to research evidence or other news stories, but once I do I'll start ranting. As we used to say in my BBS days, "Open mouth, insert foot, echo internationally."
Suffice it to say that the words of the president of Diebold ring strongly in my ears, and the statements of the delegates from Arizona sent a chill down my spine.
Something gives me a bad feeling about this. The actual election was a little too gentlemanly, given all the mud that was slung hither and yon in the weeks and months leading up to 2 November 2004. Kerry just rolled over and gave up without so much as batting an eyelash. Either he's got the presence of mind of a Zen master, or there's something that isn't obvious going on. I don't know which.
When the dam breaks, everything hits at once. It's a fact of nature, whether or not you're speaking metaphorically. A few weeks ago, I was approached by the company I'm consulting for to come on full time as a sysadmin-cum-jack of all trades. Shortly after that, I was approached by three other organisations, all bearing job offers. I interviewed with one of them and was negotiating with the other two. However, when you've got offers on the table, you can't wait too long, because companies will eventually start looking at their other options if you don't respond in a timely manner.
Last night, I accepted the offer I was given. Effective on 19 November 2004 I'll be resigning my position at the County to work for Medsage Technologies as... well..
Aw, heck. They asked for a technomancer, and they're getting one.
I just finished writing my resignation letter to the County and Adecco. I'll be handing them in tomorrow. I've just called off the other job offers.
I saw a sign that someone taped to the Big Iron at work today. It was ostensibly a letter from said Iron saying what it did for the County and what it also did during the election this year, and that it never got any thanks for flawless performance (it hasn't crashed in I don't know how long; it's had a few maintenance-related reboots, but that's about it).
I felt sorry for it, so I hugged it.
I'm going to miss it.
If anyone remembers a story about a group called the Source Code Club this summer that was ostensibly selling stolen proprietary source code, then you probably remember that they vanished from sight not long after they set up shop, because they attracted the attention of law enforcement agencies in a number of countries. They're back, or at least someone claiming to be them has set up shop. Messages were sent to a number of computer security related mailing lists and newsgroups announcing that they were selling the source code to the Cisco PIX firewall and the Dragon IDS manufactured by Enterasys Networks for several thousand US dollars each. The source code to other proprietary packages is also supposedly for sale. Assuming that these folks are really selling stolen source code, a bunch of major corporations are probably going nuts right now trying to figure out what parts of which networks were breached, and whether or not they were inside jobs. It's a safe bet, I think, that there are a number of mole hunts underway, and full audits of nearly every important box they've got are in full swing. They're really the only ways to find out what's going on and perhaps who was behind it, assuming that tracks haven't been covered too well (or lost in the noise of normal workaday operation). Only time will tell, and we'll probably never find out due to the sensitivity of these incidents.
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Got back into Pittsburgh almost exactly at 0000 EDT safe and sound. I'll write when I get time tonight or tomorrow.
You can view the current election results on this site.
I left work early today to return to the Garden so I could vote in this year's presidential election. It's amazing what a difference a quarter-hour can make in rush hour traffic. After dropping off most of my workstuff and making sure that my camera-phone was fully charged and had plenty of memory (one never knows, after all) I jumped back into the car and took off for the local polls. I fully expected there to be trouble, after hearing rumours of polling offices not opening on time (0700 EST) because the vote judges decided to sleep in. Unfortunately, I can't find evidence to confirm or deny these rumours. I also expected there to be problems because I'd just moved; I'd gone so far as to research what I could do (ask for an interim ballot) just in case this happened. Thankfully, that was unecessary. Aside from getting stuck behind a bimbo box doing twenty (miles per hour) in a forty zone uphill (I knew those things are weak, but sheesh... I kept expecting to hear the minivan coughing, wheezing, and hacking as it clawed its way uphill). Eventually I found a convenient turnoff and made it to the polls in decent time. After registering my vote, I headed back home by way of the supermarket to pick up a few things I'd forgotten (and I still forgot to buy bread!)
I'm going to be periodically refreshing that page I posted earlier to see how the election's going.
A bit more about this weekend past... Lyssa and I spent a quiet evening at home Saturday night after returning from Franklin's. We settled in to watch a few episodes of X and decompress from a long, long week (she studying, I at work doing what I do best). Sunday morning, it was decided that we'd sleep in and recuperate. Lys got up early to study while I slept the sleep of the just. After getting my brain booted back up, I made breakfast for us and left Lyssa to read while I caught up on my e-mail, and later headed out to do a little shopping. Lyssa needed a few more things to complete her costume for the party at Nation that evening. First I headed out to try to find safety pins.. several dozen of them. It seems that most of DC was completely cleaned out of them, from the CVS down the street to the sewing shoppe down the highway. I eventually got lucky at the newly-opened Target, whereupon I bought their last six packs of the largest safety pins they had.
In hindsight, I find it ironic that I did exactly what had been getting under my skin all afternoon.
The henna kit we'd bought at the Frederick's toystore had to be returned because the henna itself was dried out, and unusable. I used the refund they gave me to pick up another half-dozen bottles of temporary tattoo ink. By this time in a rush, I nearly ran down the delivery boy who was dropping off the calzones and salads we'd ordered for dinner. Oops. He's all right, I promise.
Lyssa and I were slated to hit Nation's halloween party, and we were dressing for the occasion. I was going to wear my Sumeragi Subaru costume again, and Lyssa was going as a clockwork golem. We spent the evening tricking out one of her shirts with black duct tape, safety pins, and alligator clips (thank you, Radio Shack, for your clearance rack) to approximate a stainless steel spine, which worked out quite well if I do say so myself. I did her hair up in ribbon cable and curly telephone cord, with UV-sensitive hairspray and mascara. More alligator clips and jumpers held her sleeves up to show the luminescent patches sprayed on the backs of her hands, and UV-reactive eyeliner finished her mundane (relatively speaking) makeup.
Samhain is a time where the veil is thinnest, and it becomes much easier to make changes around you, and within yourself. Lyssa had asked me to design a number of quickened sigils for her, a task which I gladly undertook (though with some trepidation, as my earlier remarks betrayed). I assembled summoning and banishing circles for her, along with a clockwork heart and the traditional inscription AMETH upon her brow, perfect for a brass and chrome golem.
A few photographs later, and we were off.
Nation isn't in the best part of DC. In fact, it's downright scary after dark, moreso if you've got prey vibes about you. It's the kind of place where you pay the crackheads to watch your car, and the owners of the club are cool with it for reasons unknown. But the crackheads are also helpful, and can tell you the safest places to park and where to avoid. Be sure to pay them a few dollars over what they ask for (for us, $5us) just to be safe. And hide all of your gear if you can.
The cover for Spooky was $12us, which included getting in to see Razed In Black and dancing the night away in two floors of smoky night club to goth (old school and new school), industrial, metal, and trance. I didn't get to partake of the trance, but the rest was pretty good, up until the replacement DJ at 0115 EST downstairs trainwrecked into ska, which left everyone on the floor wondering what the hell had happened.
Don't get me wrong, I like ska, but not when a new DJ walks in and cuts into his or her first track without even trying to fade, beatmatch, or even spin off the previous song. There's a reason this phenomenon is called a 'train wreck'.
Razed In Black put on a fantastic show - high energy and a good sound system. Unfortunately, no one could hear the lead singer until the ends of each song. Lyssa managed to snake us next to the stage by the halfway mark, using her trademark skill and a lot of finesse threading us through the crowd. I caught one of the records that were thrown from the stage (by boffing the guy behind me with my hat as I jumped and diving onto it when it hit the floor, in what I hope is one piece (I don't know because I left it at Lyssa's on the counter by accident)).
We were quite surprised to see many folks that we'd seen cosplaying at Anime USA 2004 on Saturday. In passing we saw at least five gothic lolitas, Inu Yasha, Asuka Langley Sorhyu (dressed in a latex rubber plugsuit - bloody security wouldn't allow any cameras in the club because they were filming the concert...), even one young woman cosplaying as David Mack's Kabuki (who wound up winning the costume contest).
Lyssa and I wound up wandering around and dancing, by parts. Once we found a good EBM set on the ground floor, the two of us staked out our space, Lyssa by showing off her belly-dancing skill, I by making limbs built like hydraulic actuators work. I managed to work up enough energy to take care of an internal problem that I've been dealing with for a few years now by deliberately burning out some of my circuitry, and taking the memories they held with it. Now I can barely remember what happened, which I could debate the pros and cons of for hours on end, but more importantly the emotional connections that were held by those lines of control are gone also. I honestly couldn't care less.
We decided to leave around 0130 EST, partially to make sure that we wouldn't get lost on our way back from Nation, and partially because we were both tired and wanted to get some rest. My car was safe and sound, and everything was accounted for (go, crack-heads), but we did get lost on the highway back because a sign points in the wrong direction (don't take the second exit when you're leaving or you'll circle back around when you don't want to). All told, we got back around 0230 EST or so (didn't we?) and tried to stop off for breakfast and decompression at Plato's, which is unfortunately closed that early on a Monday morning.
But wouldn't you know it, not a single UV lamp in the entire club?
Monday morning I awoke to the sounds of 'thump-thump-squish-squish' echoing like bullets in my ears. Over and over. Over and over.
It took me a few minutes to figure out what that mean. My first hangover.
Lyssa, bless her heart, got up to study and let me sleep all morning and into the afternoon. I got up to read a little around lunchtime and drank the traditional tumbler or two of water to clear my head, preceeded by Excedrin Migrane. About ten minutes later I knew that my luck had run out and headed for the lavatory.
Thankfully (or perhaps not so), my stomach was empty, so I only lost the water. I didn't see the Excedrin, but it might have dissolved by that time. The prefunctory regurgitation over, I headed back to bed to finish my book.
I got off damned lucky that time. I think that was my get-out-of-jail-free card.
Lys and I went out for Chinese a few hours later, which somehow settled my stomach nicely.
Jens Shoenfeld has has announced that betas of the Commodore One motherboard are now available! Just in time for the holiday season.. what hardware hacker wouldn't love playing around with one of these?
Still alive. Tired. Had my first hangover ever (which is pitiful because it came from one bottle of hard cider). Heading back to Pittsburgh.
Joyous Samhain, everyone.
It's not safe to be a fiction author, either. Big Brother is watching, it seems.
Congratulations to Cosplay Kate, who took an award for Best Craftsmanship at the master level in the cosplay competition at Anime USA 2004 last night!
I'm still alive. I'm in DC visiting Lyssa for Samhain weekend.
Friday was a battle, pure and simple. That server at work is still making life a major misfeature in my chassis' posterior, and most of the day was spent fighting, coaxing, cajoling, and talking to it in an effort to bring it to life. Yes, talking to it. I think I had an entire conversation with it as I introduced myself, explained the situation as I knew it to the machine, and why it was so important that it accept a new OS install, applications, et al. Thankfully, most of the people I work with weren't back in the NOC, so I won't have to explain too much about that. This time I'm doing it right, locking it down as I go along and not after the fact, to minimise what breaks. E-A- joined me in the effort halfway through Friday, which sped things up immensely, but not so much that the server was ready for testing by the end of the day. I was starting to sweat a little because the day was growing late, and I had to get home to pack and get on the road (and pick up my car, incidentally, because I had to park on the side of the road while the parking lot of my apartment building was resurfaced). As if that weren't enough, the heavens split open around 1500 EDT and pounded Pittsburgh with torrents of rain that soaked everyone to the skin, whether or not they were hiding beneath an umbrella.
Nothing like a little thunderstorm to throw you off your stride.
I had a quick dinner, more to clear stuff out of the fridge than anything else, then threw stuff into bags and then into my car, and took off for DC. I know that I forgot a lot of stuff that I was going to return, but that's going to have to wait a while before I can fix that.
Lyssa registered the two of us for Anime USA 2004, held this weekend, so I threw my Sumeragi Subaru costume into a duffel bag along with sundry other things to properly celebrate Samhain.
It never ceases to amaze me how people drive on the open highway, moreso when it's pouring down rain and visibility has been reduced to ten feet with good light, six without. On my way down to Maryland, the rain was so violent that even high beams made it just barely possible to keep tabs on the car in front, and still people were driving at or better than seventy-five miles per hour (I know this because I was doing sixty and getting lapped by cars that were out of sight faster than I could say "Holy crow"). I kept expecting to drive past them mere seconds after their cars had gone out of control and wrecked against the concrete median, another vehicle, the guardrail, or something else strong enough to convert a car into a squished tin can with former people inside. Thank the gods, that didn't happen, at least as far as I know.
I arrived at Lyssa's shortly after midnight, whereupon we unloaded the car, had a late night snack of Lyssa's amazing curry chicken soup and some cinnamon/ginger ice cream (yay!), and crashed for the night. Lyssa had been up late every night this week studying, I'd been up late every night this week with work-stuff. Both of us fell into a deep, deep sleep that lasted until daybreak and then some. Lys let me sleep an extra half-hour to catch up after the drive down, then after a breakfast of sausage and vanilla french toast we set out for the convention.
We got within spitting distance of the hotel the con was being held at without too much trouble, but actually getting there proved to be a bit of a challenge. We drove around a little until we figured out that the huge tower was, in fact, the Sheridan Hotel, and between the bumperstickers and cosplayers wandering around outside, figured out that it was the right place. Finding parking proved more difficult, but we were able to sneak into the parking garage of the Ringling Brothers Bar and Grille (they have a circus, but they run a restaurant, too??) for a few hours. No sooner had we walked in than I was ambushed by Kevin of A Fan's View. The site's based out of Virginia, so he's already got pictures up from today (I'm here, incidentally, though it's not a very flattering picture; I'll take one one of these years, I promise). Lyssa and I spent some time checking out the anime music videos (some of which were screamingly funny), wandering around the dealer's room and talking shop with the safe-and-sane yaoi dealer, taking pictures of other cosplayers, and coming to a conclusion: Fifteen year olds have no business at all wearing bondage gear. No matter how good it looks, it's a mindfuck. As the saying goes, "15'll get you twenty."
<shakes head>
We ran into Cosplay Kate near the end of our stay at the convention. Unfortunately, Lyssa and I couldn't stay longer because she had studying to do for this week, so we departed for her place. After getting lost for an hour, getting stuck in traffic on the beltway, which had turned into a parking lot in places, and nearly running out of gas (and fighting with a gas pump that didn't want to accept my debit card; I had to take it aside and have a little talk with it, also), we got back in one piece. Lys and I took some time out, and then headed out to Franklin's, a restaurant not too far away. The food there is amazing (I'll post a website or physical address later), though on the expensive side. The toystore built into the side of the store is packed with something for everyone, whether you're six, twenty-six, or eight hundred and twenty-six. We picked up stuff for Samhain tomorrow, as well as a few things for the ride home. Lyssa's studying right now, and I'm doing some research to put together a proper celebration of the new year tomorrow evening...
There's nothing like working with someone of a dissimilar path to your own to remind you of how much you really don't know. It's humbling. Embarassing, too.
Be careful what you say In Here, everyone.. you never know who's watching, and possibly ready to pay you a little visit.
Yes, I'm still alive, everyone. Dead tired and feeling like someone has kicked me a few times between wind and water, but operational.
It's a bad idea to harden a server after it's been in production for a while. You never know how the system will react when you start ripping stuff out, changing access permissions, adding patches, and turning off features. Sometimes the system will take it in stride, but sometimes.. sometimes...
Sometimes all hell breaks loose.
For the past two days, I've been working late nights to harden a small number of machines at work. One of them blew up in my face; a second is hanging on by a thread. E-A- (the guy I'm working with, and technically admin of those machines) and I have been sweating bullets and burning the midnight oil to get the boxen back on their feet and operational once more. After a marathon hacking session last night we managed to get the one functional, though not nearly as stable as we'd like. The other we stopped working on in a hell of a big hurry once we realised what was going on; it's still functional, and will remain so if we can help it. I had a little explaining to do this morning when the security chief reviewed the footage from the security cameras in the NOC, whereupon I was recorded sacrificing a live chicken (thanks, Ann-Marie) in front of said server. I also had to apologise for the Hebrew characters written in black Sharpie on the chassis; unlike the Golem of legend, I seriously doubt that the box would get up and go on a rampage through the city. Once we told the janitor that the blood wasn't human, he had fewer reservations about cleaning it up. In the end, however, all was for naught.
Today was spent building a clone of the mostly crippled system on another machine (which, through an amazing coincidence <cough>, is a near-perfect duplicate of the original). It even has the same tape drive as the original. The biggest problem was getting the tape drive recognised by the SCSI controller and Windows (you just knew that it was a Windows machine, didn't you?). Once I'd battered it about the hard drives and PS/2 connectors with a Cobra, however, it began to see things my way and accessed the tape drive like a good slave.
Things just aren't that simple. Even with blunt objects, duct tape, and a bleach enema.
The backups were bad. All of them. They couldn't be read on either machine.
Have you ever come so close to death that you could see the Grim Reaper standing there? That is very much what this felt like.
Next stop, rebuilding the machine from scratch, as soon as bloody possible. We're going to do it right this time.
I just hope that I'm able to head down to DC this weekend. I'm supposed to leave tomorrow night.
Servers have the odd tendency to hear things said around them, and make life interesting (as an ancient Chinese curse would have it) at the very last instant, just to wreak havoc.
I suppose that my walking into the NOC tomorrow with my gloves and a flogger hanging from my belt to have another discussion with that server might gather some undue attention, but at this point I'm desperate enough to reveal some technomantic mojo in the workplace.
I was kidding about the animal sacrifice, incidentally.
Terrorists have it in for Bush and Chaney, specifically? The Feds have authenticated the tape. Personally, I want to watch it so I can decide for myself. I don't have time to hunt it down right now, though. Interesting, how they're not going to show it to the public to put some more eyes on it, though.
By the bye, when I get like this, I write very silly things to blow off steam. I really didn't do any of the crazy stuff up there; this was, however, a very stressful time for me and this is how I relax. No one got hurt; no animals were harmed; no vandalism was performed. Just take it as a joke and you'll have the right idea.
It's going to be a long week, I've a feeling. I've been assigned to harden a half-dozen machines before the end of the week. It wouldn't be quite so bad if I had time to build mock-ups, but I don't. As it is, it's going to be like performing brain surgery with unsterilised tools. Touch-and-go the whole way.
Time to bust out my mad computer mojo. I think I'm going to be going down to the server room tomorrow to have a conversation with some of those boxes.
Holy cats.. Northbound Leather 2004 pictures are up. Ever seen a leather kimono outside of anime before?
Note: The abouve link isn't work-safe!
I'm going to be pulling late nighters for the rest of the week, it seems.
I'm listening to yet another remix of Delta on SLAY Radio tonight, and I still can't get over how blatant a rip off of Koyaanisqatsi it is.
If you've been following the Diebold electronic voting machine situation for the past year or so, you're no doubt familiar with how insecure the software of these machines is. You've also no doubt heard the president of Diebold state on the record that Diebold will give votes to the current president of the United States. Someone named Kim Griffith was testing the Diebold machines not too long ago and spoke to one Jim Ludwick about egregious errors in the voting process, such as one of the candidates recieving votes every time she pressed the part of the screen for the other candidate. Repeatedly. It took three tries before it even registered properly. This isn't the only time this phenomenon was reported, either - it popped up in a number of other counties around the country. Food for thought, no?
Macintosh users aren't safe anymore, either. A virus called Renepo (or alternatively, Opener) is making its rounds and it hits Mac OSX hard. Renepo is capable of turning off the native OSX firewalling functionality and sets up a back door for an intruder to gain access to the system silently later. It is also reported to be able to control the machine remotely (whatever that means - it could be anything from providing a shell to Back Orifice-like capabilities) and can gather passwords for later cracking by a locally installed copy of John the Ripper. Nasty, nasty stuff.
...and awake once more. Ten hours of uninterrupted sleep has a way of sweeping the cobwebs out of one's head, and putting one back on the right track. That, and the Garden has all but recovered from the weekend.
Yet another project today has cleared a major milestone. A test deployment at a satellite office went swimmingly well, modulo a bit of troubleshooting over the telephone with the home office. I'm very proud of it all.
All in all, today went very fast and very smoothly. I like it when life isn't a battle.
But then again, who doesn't?
Back to this past weekend...
Hasufin crashed with Lupa early Saturday morning while Lyssa and I bedded down on the floor in the living room, for want of space in the bedroom. We got up just a few short hours later on Saturday, because neither of us could really sleep, and we also had some stuff to do that morning before we could relax. Lyssa and I got dressed (she looked remarkably like Yelena Rossini on Saturday, which once again made me reconsider altering my hairstyle; I had found my smoking jacket whilst moving and decided to dress as my male net.icon - the scarf, I must admit was a new addition but worked out remarkably well). We drove out to the Pitt campus to pick up a few things, then hit Phantom of the Attic. I had to pick up some stuff that I'd ordered earlier (more C'thul'hu in 2004 bumper stickers) and found one or two books in the clearance box that I couldn't pass up (not for the sum total of $3.50us). Next we hit Phantom Comics, where Lyssa shopped for more material for her thesis and I picked up my subscriptions. After a quick stop off for beads and a bite to eat at a new Thai restaurant, we sallied forth to try to find the local Whole Foods outlet. One hour later, during which we got horribly turned around in a rather bad part of Pittsburgh, we picked up Spaceman Groove, who showed us "how to get there from here," a rare event indeed in Pittsburgh.
Some quick furniture rearranging later, I headed to my old Lab to pick up a card table and some more plasticware for the Garden's first party that night. Because we bought food and got a relatively late start, we didn't cook anything (though Lyssa did enjoy the cake I'd made the night before; it turns out that what I thought was powdered sugar was flour in a powdered sugar bag, which is why the glaze was so horrible) but we did pick up a few things that day and we also did announce it as a potluck, so we were expecting some quantity of food to arrive, we just didn't know what or how much. Michael, an old, old friend of Lyssa's was the first to arrive, with chili in hand that served just as well as dip as it did a meal in itself. John and Lara arrived next, with a mixing bowl full of their famous taco schmutz, which we barely made a dent in all night. Cheese, Zingerman's bread (eight grain three seed and cherry-chocolate, which is simply to die for), candies of sundry sorts, a bottle of Hasufin's mead (which I'm savoring the dregs of), pizza rolls, and baked pretzels were all in attendance, as well as various forms of alcohol (I got a good laugh out of people's expressions when I made myself a Tequila Pepto, as painful as it was) were arrayed around the Garden for the amusement and intoxication of all concerned.
Apples to Apples is still a good ice-breaker when you've got multiple groups of friends in one place who don't know each other. It helped start quite a few conversations that night.
Lupus brought over a marshmallow bunny rabbit the size of your fist, which was passed around the party along with a magic marker. Suffice it to say that the poor marshmallow rabbit's wardrobe was quite different from what it had arrived in, and unrecognisable as we doused it with Pam and put it in the microwave, where it inflated to over three times its original size.
There was a short fashion show involving a bodice made up entirely of leather straps, one of Hasufin's masterpieces.
I think I scared some people with the body modification photo collections. What can I say? I think cosmetic surgeons who draw up blueprints to give humans patagia are pretty neat.
Thanks to everyone who came Saturday night - you made my weekend. Photographs, of course, are forthcoming.
Hmmm.. they're thinking about moving Anthrocon to Pittsburgh next year.
| You Are a Life Blogger! |
 Your blog is the story of your life - a living diary. If it happens, you blog it. And make it as entertaining as possible. |
Well, I'm still alive after a fun weekend. Lyssa and Hasufin arrived in Pittsburgh around 0300 yesterday morning. I drove out to pick them up and guide them back to the Garden, after running across them in the street and furiously blinking my headlights in an attempt to get their attention.
After guiding them in we staged a quick trip to the grocery store to pick up stuff for the party on Saturday night. Hasufin was going to make chili for everyone, and I had to pick up some odds and ends.
You know, I'm running on next to no sleep, so I'm just going to let this wait until tomorrow.
Ye flipping break dancing gods, a gallon of taco schmutz????
The next time I retrofit my exterior, I'm going to add a garbage disposal in lieu of a stomach.
The end of the week, at long last. All hell broke loose yesterday afternoon, with people packing my office to work on a rush project, an upgrade that had to get done before the end of the week. I kept kidding my boss about forgetting to bring the pizza, because he was the last one in. If it's one thing that I just don't get about Oracle, it's views.
Or, at least how it was explained to me. I'm not a database guru, though I know just enough to be dangerous with MySQL. If you've got a single database, each user that has access to the database can see a slightly different version of it. The user 'tamahome', for example, has access to a database called 'constellation', which has a few tables in it. Another user, let's call him 'videocassette', has access to the same database, and tables with the same names. The thing is, the tables that each user can seemight not be the same tables, even though they're in the same database and have the same names. If 'tamahome' deletes the table 'book', 'videocassette' might still be able to see the table that supposedly no longer exists.
If you didn't know that ahead of time, trying to figure out what's going on could cost you quite a few hours and lots of head-scratching. Thankfully, C-, the designated DBA (database administrator) at work, figured out what was going on. With some coaching, I managed to get everything straightened out.
This left me one last emergency project, which I finished off this afternoon after a lot of backtracking and examining file permissions. Of this, I can say no more.
My free time after work has been taking up reading the first of the Dune prequels, Dune: The Butlarian Jyhad. It picks up the story from the far past of the Dune mythos, when the machines controlled most of the known universe (known as the Synchronised Worlds), and humanity was on the ropes. The story sets up many of the more memorable aspects of Frank Herbert's works, such the origins of the Tleilaxu, the Fremen riding the great sandworms of Arrakis, and the discovery of the spice of spices. The novel's been eating my brain all week - I'm nearly done with it. I think it's just as good as Herbert's very first Dune novel; just as gripping, just as fascinating.
Pick it up as soon as you can and block off a lot of time to read. You'll need it.
While we're on the subject, someone spent a lot of time finding the good in David Lynch's version of Dune. Yeah, the movie was and is painful to watch, and the soundtrack blows hamsters, but the guy does make some good points. Humans can find the good in anything, if they try.
Ugh.. the next time I make amaretto icing, I'm not going to use so much amaretto. Definitely more water than amaretto. Ick.
Such a waste of confectioner's sugar. Next time, I'm just going to buy icing. I put as little as I could on, so that it could be easily removed. I had to make the attempt, if only for the sake of appearances.
This has been one hell of a dirty election year, and this article just drives the point home. Folks are going around trying to sign up new voters, even just to re-register "to make sure that you'll be allowed to vote". There are also people going around trying to get signatures on petitions - but the signees are being told that "their votes won't count unless they sign up for the Republican party." What, pray tell, does the party that one has identified with have to do with agreeing that something going on is detrimental to people and needs to be changed? A Democrat should have the freedom to support a political issue that is espoused by the Republican party. A Republican should have the freedom to back an issue that the Libertarian party considers important. The fact that there are people using tactics like this to get people to switch sides to change the numbers on the membership rolls is just wrong. My alma mater was hit hardest by this - over four hundred students had their political affiliation changed as a result of these shenanagins. Moreover, people who flat-out refused to switch affiliations discovered that their official political designation had been changed by the people collecting signatures because they'd kept the partially filled-out forms (maybe they completed them on their own?)
Ia C'thul'hu! C'thul'hu f'thag'n!
Oh, wow.. there really is UV-reactive tattoo ink. I wonder if there are any tattoo parlours in Pittsburgh that keep this stuff in stock. I'd love to have some of my designs done with this stuff, especially the back piece I have planned.
I spoke a little too soon yesterday - some minor modifications had to be made to The Project That Just Won't Quit. Changes made, testing began. We think that some alterations have to be made to a server on the far side of the network, but I haven't heard anything since then. Shortly thereafter, an emergency call came in from my boss - I had to get a machine together and locked down to ship out on Friday.
That's not terribly difficult; I can do that in my sleep. Unfortunately, downloading updates took hours. Only some of them came through in one piece, the rest were truncated or corrupted in some obscure way, and had to be re-downloaded. This, unfortunately, took several hours.
A system at the University of California at Berkeley was cracked not too long ago, and someone may have walked off with sensitive personal information belonging to 1.4 million residents of California. Names, addresses, phone numbers, and SSNs, among other pieces of information, may have been copied and downloaded by (an) intruder(s) unknown. The data was collected as part of a programme to study people who either provided care to or recieved care from the California In-Home Supportive Services Programme. Because they really don't know if the data was downloaded or not, they're asking that everyone in the database contact the credit bureaus and tell them to put fraud watches on their files. The state government of California has withdrawn all access to this particular database.
I recieved a rude wakeup call this afternoon when I went to register as a bone marrow donor. They're having a big drive in downtown Pittsburgh right now for a little girl named Amy - locals have probably seen the flyers all over the place. After work, I walked down to sign up. I made it as far as the forms that everyone has to fill out. In fact, I made it as far as opening the form and not even starting to write on it before I asked for a clarification: The very first paragraph states that if you are a member of the follow categories (imagine a list here), you are ineligible to sign up. I identify as bisexual, even though I'm currently dating a biological female. Would that prevent me from being a marrow donor?
Yes, it would. Yes, it does.
I started posing possible scenarios to the nurse, to see how far I could push things. "What if I've never had sex with a man, even though I identify as bisexual?"
Still disqualified because I might, in the future, have sex with a man. Because donors are kept on the rolls until the age of sixty-one, the possibility that I might get lucky with a guy in the future is enough for them to consider me a risk. A bisexual woman, on the other hand, could still be a marrow donor, unless said bisexual woman has had sex with a sexually active homosexual or bisexual male.
I can donate blood, but I can't become a marrow donor?
While I'm pondering the mysteries of the human psyche, I have to wonder what, exactly, Senator Alan Keyes is smoking. Senator Keyes was quoted as saying that incest was inevitable for children raised by gay couples" because the children might not know both biological parents. What not know both biological parents has to do with the price of tomatoes in France, the number of fat electrons in a generator, or incest is beyond me. He justified this by saying that "you are in danger of encountering brothers and sisters you have no knowledge of."
I'm in shock, reading this. Exactly where did he pull this line of reasoning from? It sounds to me like this is a pretty lightly disguised "Uh-oh, I just said something stupid in an election year, time to try to cover it up."
On a lighter note, they still haven't found me out yet.
Isn't this against the Geneva Convention?
Around 1445 EDT today, those of you Outside may have heard the blast of a massive trumpet sounding from the heavens.
The project that's been giving me fits for the better part of two weeks has drawn to a close, and it worked perfectly the first time they tried it.
The reason that we'd not heard from the guys testing it was because it was working just as they'd asked, so well that they decided to just put it into full production and run with it. It would have been nice if they'd called to tell us, but sometimes one just can't argue.
Damn, I'm good.
To clear the fridge out a little tonight, I made another batch of bird vindaloo, using the curry sauce that I picked up down in DC last time I was there. The chicken breast that'd been thawing in the fridge went into the wok, along with the rest of the turkey I'd been making sandwiches with (hence, 'bird' and not 'chicken'). The last of the broccoli and tomatoes joined them, along with another goodly handful of fresh mushrooms. Tasty recipe; I'll have to remember that particular combination.
Dishes done? Check. Laundry in? Check. Bathroom and kitchen floors swept? Check. Stove cleaned? Check. Clothes picked up? Check.
Earlier today I did some reading up on the CISSP certification, which I've been preparing for for nearly a year now. Only now did I see the caveat that states that applicants for the exams must have worked as security professionals only (security officer, analyst, incident response technician... not sysadmin) for a period of four years, three if one has a bachelor's degree in a related field.
I've been working as a security professional and not a sysadmin for.. one year now, and counting. I've got two more to go before I'm even eligible to take the tests. <sigh>
Dammit.
The hardware behind Project Echelon, revealed at last. If you trust this article, anyway.
The project at work is still stalled out. Thanks, guys...
Not much happened today, all told. Got my stuff done, came home, finished the pasta with hummus I made for dinner last night, and finished reading another book. Right now I'm wondering where most of my hooded sweatshirts have gone off to, and wishing that my wrists didn't react so poorly to cold temperatures.
The last few days have been little more than rain, cold wind, and more cold. Welcome to autumn in Pittsburgh.
The Lovers often refers to a relationship that is based on deep love - the strongest force of all. The relationship may not be sexual, although it often is or could be. More generally, the Lovers can represent the attractive force that draws any two entities together in a relationship - whether people, ideas, events, movements or groups. For a full description of your card and other goodies, please visit LearnTarot.com |
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I am The Lovers
Wilhelm Reich would have loved me.
I think I slept a total of sixteen hours yesterday. My face still looks like someone worked me over with a telephone directory, but at least I can see straight and get things done with a reasonable degree of efficiency.
I went food shopping yesterday, and spent an easy $75us on food for a week. One week. It isn't as if I eat a lot, or have particularly expensive tastes. Giant Eagle, I am told, is cranking their prices up again. Time to start clipping coupons, I think.
I need to start cleaning for this weekend. The trick is to do stuff in order of how easily it'll get messed up, i.e., clean the most readily dirtied things last so they'll be nice for the weekend. I plan on taking at least some of my sound equipment back to the Lab tomorrow night, and maybe running the sweeper to clean up the living room. The night after I'll pick up my clothes (yes, I still have the bad habit of throwing worn clothes on the floor) and maybe run the sweeper in my bedroom. Cleaning the kitchen and bathroom will come last, because those get used the most.
Which File Extension are You?
Just peachy... the Port Authority, which runs the Pittsburgh public transportation system, is going to cut service and raise fares if the state of PA doesn't increase their funding. As of 1 February 2005 they're going to raise the fares from $1.75us to $2.50us for a single-zone trip and eliminate weekend, night, and holiday service (as well as the Access programme for the elderly and disabled), which is going to screw several thousand people in and around the city of Pittsburgh. As if that weren't enough, they're also going to cut their overall service by one-third, which covers 70 of 210 distinct routes. Special event shuttles to and from parking lots for major sports events will also be eliminated.
Well, there goes my being able to go in to work at odd hours and not have to sell a kidney on eBay to afford parking downtown. Tell me again why I'm still living here?
Last night was a bomb. Not the bomb, but a bomb.
Shortly after finishing yesterday's entry, I ran down my list of stuff to do and things to arrange. Last night was my opportunity to try out a cosplay costume that I'd been dying to do for a while, Sumeragi Subaru from Tokyo Babylon. After chopping the sleeves off of an old turtle neck and patching up a few rips in the shoulders earlier this week, I dug out some of the girlclothes I've been slowly but surely picking up again, and coupled with a bright red jacket and hat that I'd found at a discount store, I was suitably dressed for a costume ball, though not for near-freezing temperatures.
Mental note: Next time, cosplay as a character who wears more clothes.
The drive to the Waldorf was short and wholly uneventful. The Waldorf School of Pittsburgh, if you've never seen it before, used to be a mansion on what I think is the north-east corner of the city proper. The Waldorf Schools are very exclusive private schools renowned for the quality and depth of their education, so it was a real boon for the organisers to land this site for the Witch's Ball. I parked out front and walked into the school in search of anyone who could tell me exactly where the ball was supposed to be held and where to park. It always feels funny, walking into a building that, for all intents and purposes, used to be someone's home. I wandered around the front offices and hallways sheepishly, waiting for a teacher or a guard to jump out of nowhere and demand to know why I had snuck in. This didn't happen, but it also left me wondering where I was supposed to be. Eventually I found someone near the back of the building who was helping out with the Reclaiming Workshop (another neopagan function which I was not aware of) who showed me into the auditorium, where the ball was to be held. Bruce, the sound guy who works at the Waldorf, showed me where everything was and helped me move my gear into the auditorium and onto the stage and we spent the next two hours fussing over the connections into the PA system.
I chafed initially at hearing him refer to the other folks in the building as "nutcases, the likes of which I've never seen since I lived in California," and considered telling him off, though another part of my mind let me realise that it would probably be a bad idea to alienate someone who might have to save my ass later.
That didn't happen, but I digress.
Mina and company began arriving about a half hour after I had assembled my sound system and began taping cables to the floor so that no one could trip over them. They started to set up the usual refreshments, tables, and decorations as I fiddled. At that time I was extremely confident and waiting for everyone to start arriving.
Parasite Joe arrived not long after that and we offloaded Nemesis, his media machine, along with his collection of lights and crate upon crate of compact discs. Setting up everything proved to be little challenge - once we get into the swing of things, it's practically second nature. He ran home (less than a block away) to pick up a few more power strips so we wouldn't overload the circuit our hardware was plugged into while I began returning my gear to take Nemesis into account.
Initial sound checks were positive, but that soon faded into annoyance, frustration, and panic. The way the sound system was tuned, it was set up for one or two people speaking and perhaps an accoustic guitar, not classical and ambient music, and certainly not EBM, industrial, or techno. Paris and I spent the next two hours fighting with the sound system to alternately play anything at all, rid the sound of distortion and artefacts the likes of which have not been heard since the heyday of LPs. In short, the audio sounded like we were using a blender full of ice and concrete chunks for an amplifier.
Paris has nerves of steel; he never ceases to amaze me. Deciding that he could ask for forgiveness more easily than trying to get permission, he tore into the amp and began re-setting it to accommodate music. This took the better part of three hours, all the while the people were coming, going, and trying to have a good time. I began sweating bullets and panicking. I took Mina aside later and apologised profusely for the whole situation.
Paris finally finished retuning the PA system and began adjusting the frequency equaliser on Nemesis. The Samhain ritual took place shortly after 2100 EDT, at which time I began to re-set Kabuki's equaliser. I think I did a reasonably good job, but in the end it wound up being rather pointless. I spent the few spare minutes I had trying every trick I knew to calm down and center myself. Nothing worked.
When the ritual was over, Paris and I were given free reign to play whatever we liked. Paris had done the last set while I worked on my end of the sound system, so I was up next.
I made a poor choice for an opener - I forgot that there were kids around. Things sort of went downhill from there.. I was so shaken that I couldn't even remember what I did and didn't have with me, so requests didn't go over so well. Unfortunately, my music collection is a little of everything but I don't really specialise, so the limits of what I have at any one time are set in stone. My secondary turntable died just before Paris arrived (the motor is shot and the arm is locked in the uppermost position), so I wasn't able to use the vinyl I'd brought as I had hoped to (as I specialise in on-the-fly remixing and sampling). Parasite, however, is a master when it comes to track selection, and once he got people dancing he kept them there.. they stayed there unti I took the last rotation, at which time everyone sat down and did their own thing.
By this time I was completely worn out and ready to drop. I just wanted to leave everything there, get in my car, and drive home. Instead, Parasite and I disconnected our hardware, packed it back into our cars, and helped everyone else put the tables and chairs away. 'lex was nice enough to ride with me back to the Garden and help me offload my gear, and after getting the fifty cent tour of the Garden we drove out to the local Eat and Park for breakfast and decompression.
Ravenous after a high-stress week, a high-stress night, and not having eaten anything substantial since breakfast Saturday morning, I ripped into the breakfast buffet and ate the equivelent of two pigs' worth of bacon and sausage, among other hot foodstuffs. Two hours of good conversation and reassurance later, I drove back to the Garden and crashed hard.
Last night was the first night I'd gotten a decent amount of REM sleep, though for the lives of me I don't remember what I was dreaming about. Last night was also the first time I've been able to sleep in since I moved into the Garden.
The Windows XP SP2 firewall has been breached.
Things went well.
I had a half-day of work yesterday due to the major rearrangement of the project I've been working on for a while - it was pushed back to this weekend, so to compensate for working today I was given the chance to cut out early, a chance which I accepted eagerly because I had a few things to take care of yesterday afternoon. I got home on the early bus and after dropping some of my stuff off in the Garden I hopped into my car and drove out to my old Lab to pack up the lion's share of my sound equipment for the Witch's Ball tonight. It took far less time than I thought it would have, maybe an hour, tops. By far, unloading everything when I returned to the Garden took the most time and effort, largely due to the mass of several crates of records. As much as I love the feel of vinyl under my fingertips, it's bloody heavy when you've got a lot of it.
Once my gear was unloaded and safely stowed, I changed my clothes to get ready for the concert last night. Lupus, James, and I had tickets to see Hanzel und Gretyl, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, and Ministry live at Mr. Small's, and the concert was well worth the cost of tickets. Suitably geared in fatigues, stompers, my Hackerspotting t-shirt, war jacket, chainmail, and mirrorshades, the three of us headed out to see what we could see.
Just as we'd thought, the bands were arranged in order of how big a name they were among the people - HnG were up first. They put on a good show, as always, and really worked on stage presence. It was just as fun to look at them as it was to listen to them. They also really