Youre a wise Elf! Elves are fair and beautiful and
yet very wise. They are immortal but can dye
from a broken heart or die in a war. Elves are
respected and love peace and tranquility.
What Magical Creature are You?
brought to you by Quizilla
It was only a matter of time - even tech companies are getting tired of marketing copy that reads like Latin, full of neologisms and obfuscations that leave you wondering what, exactly, a given company does or creates. It's one thing to have some nifty text that makes you stand out from the rest of the crowd, but at this point you really need a translator to figure out what the hell's going on anymore. Buzzwords have been overused and redefined so often, they really don't have meaning for anyone anymore.
Reading marketing copy reminds me a great deal of an exercise that Peter Carroll proposed in Liber Kaos - pick a word and say it over and over and over until you lose any sense of what that word really means. It teaches you to divorce the concept from the representation (the word or text). It's kind of creepy the first few times you do it.
Friday evening I drove down to Lyssa's to spend the last weekend before the semester with her, and wound up in a number of adventures, if I may wax juvenile for a moment. On the way down a cloudburst hit DC, and because her landlord had not cleaned the gutters, the water ran down through the gap between the inner and outer walls and collected on the floor, causing a minor flood. Lyssa got it cleaned up before I made it down to DC, however. The flooding, thankfully, was minor and required little time and effort to clean up. Dinner, in the form of sushi and Chinese food, had already arrived by the time I pulled in. Silicon Dragon and Mark arrived scant seconds after I got out of the car. We were planning on driving to the Black Cat in northwestern DC that night for the Depeche Mode Release Party (no, they weren't in concert, as cool as that would have been; three DJs did an all Depeche Mode night, covering the entire history of the band). Hasufin arrived shortly after we got settled in and I began to inhale sushi like there was no tomorrow (not having eaten since 1000 EST that day, my blood sugar had crashed and the only thing I could think of was getting tanked up).
The five of us piled into Silicon's car for the drive downtown, DM 101 on the stereo. The drive was amazingly short and direct, bringing us to the club in record time (for us). Hasufin, Lyssa, and I piled out of the car while Mark and Silicon drove around to locate parking within reasonable distance from the site, which is interesting if not entertaining when traffic is still coming fast and heavy at 2230 EST in downtown DC.
Once admitted to the club, we waited around downstairs for Silicon and Mark to arrive. I guess they spent more time than they'd planned looking for parking because we eventually ran into them upstairs on the dance floor, with DM's greatest hits coming through. They'd set up a projection screen on the stage to show videos and concert footage in lieu of an actual concert, which was a neat effect given the decor of the venue. We promptly headed for the front of the dancefloor and staked out space to cut a rug. Lyssa's bellydancing skills fit well with synthpop; Silicon dragon was all over the dance floor, carving a wide swath through people packed standing-room-only doing more than the 'white boy with beer bounce' so familiar to patrons of Pittsburgh nightclubs. After so long in the data center, I remembered how to move my limbs in such a way that I didn't accidentally hurt anyone and got my groove on.
Lyssa had spent the evening trying to get Rialian to join us at the club, whom she'd met earlier last week at a gather at his house. Aahh, Rialian: As tall as Mickey Finn, built like Jack Skellington, and able to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that you can do the 'YMCA' to any genre of music if only you try hard enough.
Around midnight Friday night, just as Personal Jesus started, Rialian walked in.
Most of the night was spent dancing and making people wonder who we were and why we had descended upon the club. We did retire for a time to the cafe' (you knew that a cafe' had to be involved, didn't you?) to sit and talk. And talk. And talk some more. And make everyone in the cafe wince in pain at Rialian's puns. And talk some more. And basically get to know one another. Lyssa had the privilege of visiting Rialian a few days ago, which I had to miss out on because I don't live in DC. But that's getting off topic.
Several bottles of black cherry soda and chocolate later, we were well on our way to planning the eventual downfall of the human race, by way of throwing a big party and trading mead recipes.
World domination 101 - "Do you really want the responsibility of controlling an entire planet?"
We finished the night on the dancefloor, the way every night should be capped off. The Blackcat was closing for the night and we had to figure out where to go next. The first thing to do was to find everyone.. Mark was missing.
As it turns out, Mark had met up with four young humans of the female sex and was exchanging contact information with all of them. Not wanting to get in our friend's way, we spoke hastily to the.Silicon.Dragon and determined that he would stay by Mark's side and give him a lift home (if need be); the rest of us thumbed a ride back to Lyssa's with Rialian. Hasufin had to be up for work in a few hours, so he left shortly after we returned home. Lyssa, Rialian, and I spent the next four hours talking about everything and anything and drinking most of a bottle of Hasufin's mysterious 'batch six mead'.
Lyssa and I slept until 1500 EST Saturday, then ventured out to find dinner, in the form of hot takeout from Whole Paycheque and Giant (the food from Giant wound up sucking, and was pitched shortly after sampling it). The evening was spent at Lyssa's, sitting around watching television and generally feeling disoriented because we woke up at an unusual point in our circadian cycles (i.e., in mid-afternoon instead of during the morning).
Sunday, we slept in again, to the tune of 1200 EST or therabouts. Lyssa made breakfast, and afterward we went back to bed to, yes, sleep for another few hours. This weekend wiped us out completely. We ran to the supermarket for groceries, and then I loaded everything back into my car for the trek back home.
I'm home, safe and sound.
I drove to DC this weekend to spend some time with Lyssa before her final semester of grad school began, and we wound up having a couple of adventures, almost from the get-go. I'll write about those tomorrow, however.
I pulled out of DC around 1800 EST, after loading the few things I'd brought into the car. A quick stop off for petrol and I was on the beltway headed in the general direction of Pennsylvania (by way of Boston).
I never said that the beltway made any sense. All I said was that the best way to travel on it is to put the hammer down and pray that you can find the exit you need before you get cut off by a convoy of tractor-trailers and minivans that think they've got the acceleration and fuel efficiency of a cyclone bike. This I managed with little difficulty; after some practise you learn how to drive like an asshole just enough to find the lane you need for the proper amount of time.
About twenty minutes from the border, it began to snow. Then it began to snow very hard. Then visibility plunged to +/-10 feet.
Navigating by the tail lights of the car in front of me, I managed to make it all the way to the Pennsylvania border, at which time I changed lanes to actually enter a state famous for forcing everyone driving on the highways (regardless of whether they are two-lane, three-lane, or four-lane highways) to drive in the rightmost lane most of the time... and slid headlong on a patch of ice. Thank the gods for antilock brakes, my car ground safely to a halt at the red light.
Six seconds later, my hearts and stomach caught up with me and resumed their customary locations within my anatomy,
The drive got even more hair-raising from there, mostly due to the blowing snow keeping visibility at a comfy +/- 10 feet with the highway covered with a nice mixture of ice crystals, snow, slush, and even liquid water. This not only obscured the lines painted on the asphalt, but it also made it next to impossible to change lanes without skidding laterally (which I did twice).
And now, an open letter to the dipshit driving the big rig who nearly ran me off the road:
Dear Dumbass:
Thank you so much for sneaking into my blind spot while we were driving towards Pittsburgh on I-76 west tonight. I really appreciate the way that you waited until the cab of your tractor was right next to my passenger's side window when you blew the horn loudly enough to deafen me for a good twenty miles. You could easily have waited another minute until you were ahead of me before attempting to cross into my lane without looking. When you decided to pretend that you were identifying yourself as a trucker on Coast to Coast AM five hours early, you scared the living hell out of me. When you began to turn left at the same time, you almost forced me into the concrete barrier separating the outbound and inbound lanes, which could easily have killed me. I sincerely hope that the next time you take to the open highway in your big rig you get pulled over by the police and arrested because your employer has you smuggling something highly felonious in the United States of America.
Sincerely yours,
The Doctor
Thankfully, by the time I reached the Allegheny County line, the snow had been reduced to a light dusting. The roads, while wet, were not treacherous in this area, and my return to the Garden fully uneventful.
I plan on paying the parking ticket I recieved in DC along with my gas bill tomorrow night. I forgot that, unlike Pittsburgh, metered parking does not become a free-for-all at 1700 EST, but at 2200 EST.
I'm haemorhhaging money this month.
Following hot on the heels of the winning of the X Prize (for the successful launch of the first commercial spaceflight) by Spaceship One, funded by Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos (of Amazon.com fame) is planning to construct a commercial spaceflight facility in western Texas. Bezos' company, called Blue Origin (has anyone else noticed that the names of new companies are starting to sound like those in Walter Jon Williams novels?) is constructing the facility to serve as a testing and operations centre for privately funded suborbital flights. Information is sketchy right now because Bezos and his backers are keeping most of the project a strictly controlled secret; there's an excellent chance that they'll be the first in this field, because they've got a jump on everyone else in this new field of endeavour. They're serious enough about it that they're talking to the FAA for clearance for test launches and the EPA to have environmental impact studies performed on their prospective launch site.
A couple of days ago, I sent senator Arlen Specter an e-mail pertaining to the possibility of one Alberto Gonzales to a position of White House council. This morning, my e-mail server sent back the following response: "Delivery to the following recipients failed: Arlen_Specter@specter.senate.gov"
I can't say that I'm very surprised by this. Whispering in a windstorm..
Well, it's the middle of January, and the expected high temperature today is supposed to be 60 degrees Farenheit. As I was was walking out the door this morning, it was easily warm enough to only have to wear a turtleneck to stay comfortable. It was about as warm last night, too, definitely warm enough to drive around with the windows down and the music up, just like early spring. The thing is, the temperature is expected to drop 40 degrees by sunset tonight, with snow predicted for the weekend.
There's a joke in Pittsburgh that if you don't like the weather, just wait ten minutes and it'll change, hopefully to something more to your liking. I didn't know that it could be quite so radical, though.
Last night was a good night to drive around, though. The wanderlust struck after dinner and I hopped into the car and headed for the open road. I hit the grocery store to pick up a few things and then, for the hell of it, drove to the mall to see what's been going on in the mundane world, the place of pastel coloured spring-line clothing and video games of every type and skill level, the better to spend hours sitting in front of the TV with. Things haven't really changed much - there weren't many people out last night, especially high school kids. Stores were empty and staff were always walking by to ask if I was looking for anything in particular. Hot Topic has a limited-edition release of the soundtrack to The Nightmare Before Christmas on vinyl. No, I didn't buy it, but I did note the existence of the two-record set. But that aside, it was a quiet evening, an excellent chance to do a little people watching and to see how things have changed.
They haven't changed radically.
Everyone who's ever taken a chemistry class has probably seen or done the experiement where you take a tiny chip of lithium or sodium and drop it into a petri dish of water to watch them explosively react. Of course, if you performed the experiment yourself, you were probably decked out in protective gear, including goggles and probably gloves, in case something went wrong (but nothing ever went wrong, did it?) In later days, if you kept up with chemistry in some form, someone's probably gotten the bright idea of acquiring an amount of one of those elements far larger than that allotted in the past with the intent of throwing it into a much larger volume of water to see what would happen. Someone did, and documented the escapade. A very large amount of metallic sodium was acquired from eBay (I wonder why they didn't spike the auction because it is a dangerous material) and a device was constructed that would safely drop large chunks of the metal into water. The article talks at great length about the dangers of doing stuff like this, among them the fact that the smoke generated by such an activity probably isn't smoke as we usually think of it but a mist of sodium compounds which probably won't play nicely with your mucus membranes or eyes, the great quantity of heat produced, and the unnerving predilection of chunks of sodium to jump great distances while reacting explosively. If you are even peripherally interested in hijinks like this, give it a look. Also give the QuickTime videos on the site a look, because they've very interesting.
As someone who's lost a few sets of eyebrows, please don't try this at home. It's just too dangerous.
Vlieger and Vandam have just released their line of stylish handbags and briefcases with a twist: Raised outlines of guns and knives, to make prospective muggers think twice about rolling you for your shiny things. There are also laptop bags that have outlines of groceries, in the hope of making it less likely that you'll have yours snatched.
Now ask yourself this: If you were a security guard or police officer and you spotted someone walking around and you saw what almost perfectly duplicates the outline of a Barette 9mm pistol on someone's handbag, what would you do?
If you said, "Accost them because they appear to be armed, as any good law enforcement officer would do," you're right.
I'd love to see someone try to get through an airport with one of these.
Frequent readers are no doubt aware of the problems I've been having with Dell Computers. In November of 2004 I ordered a new laptop computer, custom built, from them. Among the customisations I ordered was an extra 256MB of RAM. When I recieved Luel, he did not have the memory expansion installed or included. I contacted Dell Customer Support and asked that they send the memory module under separate cover. The order was cancelled a few days later. I then called them and asked why they cancelled the order. They didn't know, but they put another one through.
That other order was cancelled near the end of December 2004.
I called today and got the runaround for the better part of two hours before giving up. Thankfully, they're not going to charge me (it turns out that they didn't charge me to begin with - damn their un-itemised invoices (their invoices have everything I requested but each option doesn't have a separate price, so I really have no idea what I paid for and what I didn't)) but I'm sick and tired of dealing with them. I cancelled the order and told them off.
Ladies, gentlemen, lifeforms of all ages.. don't order from Dell. If you need to get customer support, you're just going to get the runaround. If you placed an order for a custom machine and something wasn't done or wasn't included in your order, chances are you're not going to get it. Take your business somewhere else.
My garbage disposal ate its first spoon today. Both appear to still be functional, but I'm not sure I want a spoon with those kind of gouges in them anywhere near the soft tissues of my mouth. They look a little too sharp for comfort.
No one is safe from compromise these days... even T-Mobile. Their network was compromised by a cracker for over a year before being captured during Operation Firewall in October of 2004. Nicholas Jacobson, age 21, was arrested for monitoring the e-mail sent from a cellphone/PDA owned by an operative of the US Secret Service, as well as copying and redistributing documents sent and read from agent Peter Cavicchia, reading and redistributing customer records (chock full of Social Security Numbers and addresses) and downloading photographs taken by the camera-phones of T-Mobile users. An informant in the underground reported Jacobson to the Secret Service when Jacobson posted to a number of web forums about what he was capable of doing (basically doing go-tos on people given their phone numbers). Because the Secret Service offered Jacobson a deal (leniency in exchange for becoming an informant) they're keeping word of this bust under wraps to avoid compromising their new tool. Undercover Secret Service agents made contact with Jacobson and offered him the use of an open proxy server which they'd rigged up to record all traffic passing through it to gather evidence.
Most of the parties burned by this security incident either refused comment or have not responded to interview requests.
Sysadmins take warning: Microsoft has retired Windows NT v4.0. No further patches or security updates are available. Also, premiere and pay-per-incident technical support have been discontinued. Time to get on the upgrade treadmill and drop another quarter or so of your IT budget.
Koji Kondo, called the Blindfolded Pianist has posted sheet music of all of the music from the Super Mario Brothers games on his website. Check this stuff out - it's wild.
System modders take note - now you can rice out your RAM. Corsair has developed what they are calling XMS XPERT memory modules, which have a fully programmable 10 character LED display attached to the edge facing away from the mainboard. By default the displays list memory speed, current running voltage, and temperature of each module in sequence, though other messages are possible. Each DIMM has a microcontroller chip on-board which controls the LCD displays. The modules are PC 3200 XL DDR (double data rate) and will be sold in kits of two 512MB DIMMS for a starting price of $449us. Expected street date: 1 February 2005.
Bruce Schneier has opened fire on school districts fingerprinting children to prevent kidnapping, and he's done so far better than I ever could. If you're concerned about this, or you just want to know how taking a kid's fingerprints is going to prevent them from being kidnapped (it won't, though it will make it easier to identify the body if it's ever found), read it.
An airplane with the registration number N379P has been spotted in the skies numerous times since 11 September 2001. The thing is, no one seems to know whose plane it really is. Speculation runs rampant. The name 'Leonard T. Bayard' has been connected to this registration number by way of Bayard Foreign Marketing, LLC, but that doesn't seem to help. Check out the links they've dug up and see for yourself.
Microbiology, it seems, just mibght be harmful to your health, though not for the usual reasons. Since late 2001 or early 2002, microbiologists all over the world, the real luminaries of the field, have been turning up dead. The number has recently reached 25, incidentally, but to get back to things, one or two every month or so are turning up dead - clubbed to death, shot in robberies, mugged but nothing has been taken, electrocuted, in one instance even apparently blown off of a highway by a passing truck, where he fell to his death. Rumours of this have been flying around since the get-go, wich I've been keeping an eye on, but I hadn't found any hard documentation at all on the matter. Dropping words into ears hasn't worked, either. I wonder why it took so long for this to make it to the newswires...
.mp3 files of the speakers at HOPE 2004 are now available on the web, thanks to the 2600 crew. Share and enjoy!
I completely forgot about the North Hills Pagan Discussion Group meeting last night. I'm so used to not being able to go out at night, it never even occured to me to go. Instead, I spent the night doing lifestyle maintenance, stuff like picking up the Garden a little, changing the water in the aquarium, and reading some stuff for work that I've been putting off for a while. My bad.
No nightmares last night.
That stuff aside, not much has been going on lately. Work's kept me busy so there hasn't been much going on to write about.
On the Net, nobody knows that you actually bought your #1 spot in the search engine results.. at least, nobody that hasn't done a little digging. Ken Lay, former CEO of Enron Oil, the company famous for screwing all of its employees when upper management sucked it dry with their private scams is paying off major search engines to make sure that his version of the Enron story gets top billing. Yahoo, Google, and America On-Line's internal search engine are being paid to the tune of several cents every click (times a few hundred thousand clicks...) to ensure that Web searches on various terms related to the Enron scandal return a link to a version of the events that make him not look like the bad guy, complete with articles that paint him as a decent human being, some legal documents he's filed in the past, and a few editorials.
Incidentally, Ken Lay is charged with eleven counts of securities and wire fraud, making false financial statements, artifically inflating earnings.. the exact charges may be read in < ahref="http://news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/enron/usvlay70704ind.pdf">this .pdf file, which is the full list of charges against Lay.
You make the call.
Copyright law was originally meant, if I understand the documentation, to prevent people from taking someone else's work and calling it their own. When it was first developed, I really don't think that it was designed to prevent people from taking other people's stuff apart to see how it worked, or to see if there was anything hidden in it that could prove hazardous. The direction I'm going in with this is the trial of Guillaume Tena, who reverse engineered parts of Tegam Viguard and found a number of security vulnerabilities in it. Tena published what he found in 2002, and was promptly sued by Tegam, though the actual trial wasn't supposed to start until 2004 (it didn't actually start until 5 January 2005). Tegam is asking that Tena be given four months in jail and a total of €906k for fines and damages. I think they got angry because Tena discovered that by exploiting these vulnerabilities, it was possible to make the antivirus scanner not detect some viral code, which contradicts Tegam's claim that Viguard detects and removes 100% of all viruses.
Feel like looking at web-based securicams that no one's bothered to configure yet? Note: Some of these links might not be work-safe, and the legality of peeking through these cams is questionable at best. Use an anonymiser if you're worried.
Here's another collection of securicams that really need to be configured properly. The same caveats apply.
In a move that is probably surprising the detainees as much as everyone else in the world, four British citizens and an Australian detained at Guantanamo Bay will be released 'soon' (as in real soon now knowing how bureaucracy works), though a timeframe of two weeks has been given. One confirmed suspect will also be released during this time due to lack of evidence. The US controllers of the prison refused comment. Out of 550 detainees, only four have actually been charged with anything. The four have been incarcerated at the prison camp without being charged for the past three years.
The "don't report a miscarriage, go to jail" bill has been spiked. HB1677 has drawn a hell of a lot of fire from weblogs all over the Net, and Cosgrove pulled the bill before it could be made law.
Way to go, people.
This morning got off to a decent start, modulo having to backtrack a few times. Everything went smooth as silk up until I realised that I'd forgotten my pocket computer and cellphone. Because I was standing on the staircase of my apartment building, turning around could only be done in place. Somehow I got my umbrella caught in the staircase, which made me trip, which didn't knock me down the stairs but did result in my rapping my knee on one of the metal bars, which still smarts a little. That aside, everything's fine.
..and the dreams this morning. Ugh.
I hate heights. That is, in part, why I used to rock climb and why I still like going up on roofs - in the hope that one day I'll eventually burn my fear of heights away, and they won't bother me quite so much anymore. My dreams early this morning were full of walking through someone's opulent mansion, all highly polished marble, granite, and brass. There were two staircases, one narrow and one very, very narrow, little more than one foot square slabs of marble balanced on brass rods. I was with a group of people who were going down into the lower levels for some reason, and I got stuck with going down the really tiny staircase.. and then I froze from veritgo. Utterly unable to move, I was paralysed by visions of losing my balance, falling, and perhaps mercifully bashing my brains out after a few impacts with the steps. The dream seemed to go on for a good half-hour or so, even though it was probably only a few minutes of realtime. The worst part was that I kept jolting myself awake, my hearts hammering in my ears, then trying to go back to sleep.. only to re-enter the dream in exactly the same place I'd awakened from.
At least my dreams are fully thread-safe.
By 0700 EST I'd finally managed to rid myself of the nightmare and get a few more minutes of rest.
Any fucker who will throw a kitten into the ocean three miles off of the coast of Clearwater, FL to drown or be eaten by the fish and gulls should be drawn and quartered.
Microsoft Internet Explorer has another vulnerability that can result in remote execution of code on a workstation that just views a malicious web page. Specifically, a hole in the cross-site scripting engine of MSIE allows a specially formatted web page to upload and execute a programme.
Firefox, people, Firefox.
This is a pretty cool idea - Sandisk has developed an SD card that has a USB v2.0 interface built into it. You can plug the module into your camera/phone/PDA and if you don't have a reader on a computer, you can open the case and plug it straight into a USB port, so you don't have to carry around a reader or a data cable. Keep your eyes open for this one on the consumer market, it looks pretty cool.
It's a bad idea to drink to excess. It's a bad idea to make an ass of yourself if you're drunk or sober. It's dangerous to piss people off if you pass out. Note: This site isn't work-safe. Read at your own risk.
If the ethics mavens don't pick up on this, something's wrong.. the Bush administration paid political columnist Armstrong Williams to write articles hyping the No Child Left Behind programme. Williams recently admitted to taking $240kus from the Bush administration in exchange for writing colums that painted the programme in a favourable light. It should be noted that there are a number of federal laws on the books meant to prevent taxpayers' money from being used to influence public opinion. It was stipulated in the deal that Armstrong also try to convince other columnists to write such articles, also.
The past two days have been on the harrowing side, to be sure. Last night I had to drive back to the old homestead to go through the last of my stuff that was in my old room so that renovations could begin. There was a lot of stuff piled up in the closet that I haven't looked at since I got here, a good ten years ago (nearly eleven). There were short stories that I didn't even remember writing in high school, keepsakes from as far back as grade school(!), stuff I brought back from any number of conventions that I stuffed in amongst the clothes and forgot about. There's a lot of stuff that can be thrown out; it's sheer cruft, stuff that's so old it's practically decaying. I also found a lot of stuff that I'd forgotten about, stuff that I actually packed up and brought back to the Garden with me. I found the Latin dictionary that I was using to learn the language when I was very, very small, a small cache of disappearing ink, all manner of trinkets from days gone by, old clothes, baseball caps.. I even found a real baseball bat, from the days when the Pittsburgh Pirates could actually win games, and the stadiums in Pittsburgh weren't the private scam of the administration (so let me get this straight.. the original stadium was not even paid off yet and they demolished it and constructed two new ones, which sent the city's economy into a nosedive). It'd old enough that Atari is listed as one of the sponsors of the game.
A lot of that stuff can safely be pitched, not because I don't want it but, as I said earlier, it's just decaying.
The short stories were from college and high school, and upon leafing through them I was mortified. I couldn't believe that I ever wrote stuff like that. It was, to put it mildly, tripe. The stuff I wrote later in college wasn't too bad, but...
Lyssa and I had a long discussion about htat last night after I returned to the Garden. She says that it's perfectly normal, and that the early work of a lot of people is bad. I'm still a little embarassed about it, though. A lot of them are the dreams of a high-school kid who really needed to get out and see the world, to be honest. I wound up doing just that, though, after I graduated from high school. Without a lot of things tying me down, I was able to go out and about. I went to parties and conventions, had some close scrapes, did a few things that I regret, did a lot more things that I don't regret, and learned a lot about life. I met some people I love, some people I detest, and a lot of people who fall somewhere in between those two poles. I got to see the world, which is the most important thing. When I have a chance, I still do. I go out and do stuff, which is really what I was dreaming about.
Sometimes I need a sledgehammer to get things through my head.
The stuff I found from grade school was the hardest to go through, though. Just touching some of those things brought back memories that I didn't know were inside me, many of which that I really wish had stayed buried. The emotions were palpable as I picked up lengths of paper, some with tempra paint smeared over them, others with hastily scrawled words. My hand stung as I looked at some of the things I found. There's a lot of pain in those things, pain and suffering. Events that I am not comfortable talking about, let alone thinking about are in there.
Flashbacks of those things came fast and furious - flashbacks indicitive of a brain that is conditioned to not let go.
I am not sure that I still want those things around.
The headache finally faded sometime Saturday morning.
After burning another couple of CDs to back up data from Leandra, and taking one final backup of everyone's home directories (anyone want to donate to the Network so I can get a DVD-RW drive?) I shut Leandra down and began installing the latest revision of Slackware. My experience with Debian GNU/Linux was, on the whole, a good one. My only complaint is that some of the systemware was very out of date (a href="http://www.xfree86.org/">XFree86 v4.1.0?! That was a serious downgrade, with corresponding 3D acceleration problems) and I was unable to compile more modern software packages on it. I didn't like having to download, compile, and install the latest revision of Python, for example, to run some of the utilities I find essential; I kept the Debian-native version of Python installed so some of Debian's natively built utilities would run, also. That kind of disparity I find highly annoying.
Slackware's gotten much better with included application. The packages are still gzipped-tarballs (.tgz) with some scripts inside them to facilitate installing and removing the package, and they're not as granular as, say, Fedora Core, but when you're building a personal system, it's not uncommon to install both the application and development packages at the same time; Slackware has both the apps and their develkits in the same package, to install at the same time. Six of one, a half-dozen of the other. The system initscripts have also changed such that services listening on the network interfaces don't necessarily start at boot time (when /etc/rc.d/rc.S and /etc/rc.d/rc.inet2 execute). Now they call other initscripts (for example, /etc/rc.d/rc.bind) if those scripts are marked as executable; otherwise the binaries just sit on the drive to be run whenever you need them. At installation time you're also given an opportunity to pick the services you want to run and the ones you don't (to re-use my example, if you install the BIND package so you have the host and nslookup utilities available, you don't necessarily have to be running the named daemon as well).
For those of you who are tired of compiling everything on a Slackware machine, check out slapt-get, which works just like Debian's APT (Advanced Packaging Tool). If you put into your /etc/slapt-get/slapt-getrc file the URLS of your favourite Slackware mirror and a mirror of linuxpackages.net, you'll have access to a large repository of Slackware packages, again, just like Debian. I've made a habit of using slapt-get to keep my boxes up to date, and it's seems to work very well. A problem I have run into is that sometimes the mirrors of Linuxpackages fall out of sync when new files are uploaded, and sometimes an app can't be installed automatically. I've taken to using lynx to download those packages to install them by hand, which isn't the best solution but one that should be kept in mind if you go this route. The other thing I've noticed is that sometimes slapt-get will notice third-party packages on another site and install them as updates when in fact they aren't. When I was updating Leandra slapt-get downloaded packages of x.org v6.8.1 because it thought they were upgrades (which they technically are), uninstalled the native x.org packages, and installed the new ones. I really didn't want this, and the v6.8.1 packages don't seem to be as stable as the native ones are. 3D acceleration is a little hairy, and I ran into some trouble when installing OpenOffice.org. If this isn't what you want (it isn't what I want; I'll be downgrading in the near future) add the string "x11-*" to the EXCLUDE line of /etc/slapt-get/slapt-getrc.
By 0200 EST this morning, everything was up and running once more, and Leandra is happy and healthy. I helped her get comfortable in her new systemware last night, and she hasn't had any complaints.
I'm glad that I walked around my car in the opposite direction yesterday after work - I discovered that I'd gotten a parking ticket on Wednesday. In Pittsburgh, parking tickets have a ten-day window in which they must be paid, or else the city will theoretically come after you for ignoring it. Since the city is in something of a budget crunch right now, they very well might decide to clamp down on people who don't get around to paying the $25us in a timely manner (they've been going through their backlog of tickets for the past year or so, much to the chagrin of many who work in semiurban areas of the city). Instead of tucking it under a windscreen wiper, they stuffed it down into the vent, where I didn't see it immediately.
Anyway, paying $25us for a parking ticket amounts to paying $5us per day for parking, which is still disgustingly cheap for Pittsburgh, where it isn't unusual to pay upwards of $20us per day for parking.
I also got my credit card bill paid last night (bastards think nothing of cutting you a 'Holiday concession' by only charging you $50us but then raising your rate the very next month a point or two) through their website, but I fail to see why a cash transfer from my bank to MBSA's coffers would take four days, which is conveniently (for them) a few days past the due date, which will no doubt result in a late charge next month, which screws me out of any chance to negotiate a lower interest rate. If I can pay my gas and electric bills online and have the payments credited within sixty minutes, why can't MBSA do the same thing?
I can see why loan sharks are so rare these days - the credit bureaus don't like competition.
Most folks who live in the US might not know that the Federal Communications Commission allows private citizens to broadcast at 100 milliwatts or below on the FM radio bands without requiring a commercial license, only some care to ensure that they're not interfering with anyone else (particularly emergency communications) or causing problems for the folks living around them (RF interference). Bruce Perens has been experimenting with this lately, and he's posted his results to his website for everyone to check out. He wanted to listen to net.radio around his house but the little FM transmitters that you can plug into your iPod's headphone jack don't have much range, so he picked up a tiny FM transmitter from eBay, dialed back the broadcast power a little, and discovered that he was able to cover his block without too much trouble. By connecting it to a decent broadcast antenna it would be possible to get much greater broadcast range out of this unit.
Something to consider messing around with, while it's still legal.
If you get roped into going into Starbucks some time, you'll find that their menu of beverages is vast, yet poorly documented. Someone's put together a field guide to Starbuck's coffees so you know exactly what you're getting. "misto" really means "cafe' au lait" and "americano" is their name for "espresso diluted to half strength", for example. This field guide also does a good job of defining exactly what all of the trendy coffee-like drinks are (what the hell is a "frappucino", anyway?) so you can discuss coffee drinks intelligently with people who spend just as much on coffee as they do on the rest of lunch.
Personally, I go with plain coffee, the house blend of wherever I happen to wind up for coffee. If I want something sweet, or something that has a lot of milk in it, I go for dried fruit or ice cream. Then again, that's just me.
I've heard something interesting on the winds about truck stops in the US and wireless networking (802.11 - either type 'b' or type 'g'). My source says that more and more truckstops, at least up and down the Eastern Seaboard, have open wireless access points running because truckers, who are doing more and more bookkeeping over the Net (travel logs, I'd presume) need them to keep their records up to date (and of course, check their e-mail; being on the road for weeks at a time has a way of cutting you off from the rest of the world). I haven't tried any of them yet (when travelling alone, I like to keep signs of expensive electronic equipment hidden for obvious reasons) but I am curious about doing so.
My source says that he's used them often in the past two weeks (he's been on the road pretty much the whole time, and they've been the only way he's been able to get on the Net) without fail.
Pardon my language, but what the flaming fuck?! Have a miscarriage in the state of Virginia, don't report it within 12 hours, be charged with a class 1 misdemeanor and wind up in jail for a year and/or a $1200us fine?!. Representative John Cosgrove has proposed this as bill hb1677. Because fetal death statistics are carefully tracked by the US government, they must be reported by doctors. The thing is, if you see a doctor (and if you're preganant and you start haemorhhaging you damn well better get to the emergency room), they're going to report it no matter what. This article makes it sound like you can miscarry at home and not be in any danger (bullshit) and safely not seek medical assistance (double bullshit). The article makes news of a poorly-aimed bill that really needs to be reworked but in a needlessly sensationalistic (and inaccurate) manner. As for this being an infringement of privacy, it probably isn't. The loss of a fetus is not a small matter, and must be addressed by a physician. This goes into your medical records. One of the reasons that these statistics are monitored is to keep track of potential environmental problems that may be the cause of large numbers of miscarriages in a particular geographic area (whether or not these problems will ever be addressed I do not intend to discuss at this time). Keep an eye on it, but take this write-up with a fairly hefty grain of salt.
These guys are on crack. I really don't think that the United States used a neutron bomb to clear out Kubaysaat Street. Neutron bombs require a conventional nuclear device to generate the energy to set them off. A conventional nuclear device does a hell of a lot of damage on its own. As much as I hate war and detest violence, this sounds like hysteria to drum up knee-jerk support.
I don't like being people trying to manipulate me. I don't like people trying to manipulate other people, either.
That's it. The next time I get an urge to write about a nuclear exchange I'm going to drug myself into a stupor to keep from doing so. I think I set something loose yesterday.
Today started off with a coffee maker mishap. The water in the tank, instead of boiling and going through the grounds just boiled and overflowed the counter top. Thankfully, I caught the malfunction before it went too far and flooded the entire countertop, and certainly before anything electrical was damaged by the pseudo-coffee. Some paper towels later and everything appears right as rain, though there isn't as much coffee as usual in there for everyone.
Depressing. That coffee's going in my barrel.
I feel compelled to write about something that's been going on over a number of mailing lists that I monitor. The whole "end of the world/final battle" thing is beginning to heat up again, with some people awaiting (anxiously, I think) another world war so that the human race will be obliterated, leaving only a select few to take over.
Folks.. that's bullshit.
First of all, nuclear war isn't all that likely at this point in history. Mutually assured destruction (the doctrine of "If you nuke us, we'll nuke you just before your bombs hit and we'll both be erased") pretty much assures that no one is going to push the button. Second, every continent on this planet has natural resources that the others cannot do without. If the US were nuked, the grainfields would be destroyed, or at least rendered unusable for the next few millennia. Because the United States ships grain overseas, this screws a sizable segment of the world's population. Now, please ask yourself: If you were a fairly big country, and you had the opportunity to destroy a large fraction of the grain that the peoples of the world needed to survive, don't you think that all of those countries who would be getting their starvation on would be leaning on you to no do it? Even if it meant that they ran to someone else and had them point a few at you just so they could eat?
You can't plan stuff like that without shaking up the power structure, and that power structure is going to react in such a way to prevent you from going through with it.
Second, such a war would mean the contamination of much of the world's water supply. Fallout goes into rivers, which go into the oceans, which would be carried by the transoceanic currents and distributed throughout the oceans (though probably not evenly; chaotic systems are neat like that). If this were to happen during this hypothetical war, this would poison the oceans, as well as killing off another big percentage of the world's food supply. Archipelagos and coastal nations would be crushed by this loss of ocean life. I'm not qualified to comment on how messing with transoceanic currents (remember - thermonuclear war implicitly means high temperatures, on the order of several thousand degrees Farenheit, which has the potential to change air and water currents through convection and sheer blast waves) would affect the oceans and the weather, so I will refrain from speculation on this point. I will, however, ask that you at least wonder about that for a little while.
As I mentioned before, there's going to be a lot of pressure from everyone else on the globe to not do something like this. War is bad for everyone, nuclear war moreso.
Third, intelligence networks these days are pretty complex, and the likelihood of a fifth column detonating a nuclear device or even a dirty bomb (a very powerful conventional explosive laced with radioactive material; the blast throws fallout around while not being a true nuclear detonation) with the end of making it look like one country just lobbed an ICBM at another country is small. If such a bomb were to go off.. well, that would just suck for obvious reasons. What I am driving at right now is that the leaders of the country which was just attacked would hopefully use their collective brain before their collective right index finger and consult their intelligence agencies and spooks and hopefully find out that no one sent an ICBM their way, but a bunch of folks with a mad-on and a bomb just made life interesting, in the sense of an ancient Chinese curse. Net result: No one lobbing nukes willy-nilly.
Fourth.. come on, people (you know who you are). Just because you think you're better than the rest of the human race by dint of who you are and/or what you are does not mean that you're immune to an overpressure wave, several thousand degrees Farenheit, and hard radiation. You're also quite vulnerable to a bullet fired from a gun of some kind, sharp objects inserted into many parts of your bodies, loss of blood, long falls, and just about anything else that would kill a 'normal human'. Get over yourselves. If there was such a war you'd not be next in line to inherit this planet, you'd probably be just as dead as everyone else.
Fifth, there have been people prophecying the End Times and The Final War for thousands of years, and none of them have been right. The end of the world has been slated to be in 2012 CE, 633 BCE, 1976 CE, 167 BCE, 2000 CE, 1000 CE, 53 CE... the list goes on and on. It's highly likely that you're not going to be right, either, so there's no sense in trying to stir people up.
That's not to say, however, that some wingnut out there won't get it in his or her head that they're obligated to make some prophecy come true and do their best to bring about the end of the world somehow. People are funny like that.
Some of you are NOT scions of lines of Celtic Pagans, you're following paths that were reconstructed from what people (both archeologists and neopagans) know of what things might have been like back then, but no one really knows. People that far back didn't leave written records, and the scholarship of many reconstructionists is spotty at best. If you've got some hidden knowledge about the way things were, by all means, please share it with the rest of the world. You'll revolutionise Celtic archeology, as well as comparative religion. I, for one, would love to learn how those languages were spoken and written (mostly so I could go over the scholarship of some of the texts I've come across to see exactly what was right and what wasn't).
There is no conspiracy keeping you from doing so. You'd go through hell proving it, to be sure, but I don't think there'd be any risk to your lives attempting to prove it.
Also, the Burning Times were not a pagan or neopagan hunt, they were the result of patriarchal societies trying to take land and wealth from people (women, in particular) that were seen as threats to power or may have deviated from religious dogma because they were midwives or herbalists. It wasn't even the Church that was behind it, but local communities acting on their own.
Do a little research, people, and be prepared to find stuff that you don't like.
Just when you thought it was safe to play video games, along comes the phenomenon of game mods, hacks for games that add or alter gameplay in certain ways. Think of them as adding your own easter eggs. The thing is that mods can go horribly wrong under certain circumstances, in the case of The Sims 2 spreading like viruses due to how the virtual environments are handled. Some mods that have been created for this game change the rules in fundamental ways, such as allowing a single cup of espresso to take care of all of a Sim's needs or changing how gravity works (Sims... in.. spaaaaaace!) The thing is, not everyone wants these mods installed, and there's no clear-cut way of removing the hacks once they're in place. Once a single house has been exposed to this functionality, the entire Sims neighborhood of a given copy of the game is altered. The Electronic Arts user forums are burning up with people asking for help.
I think that this is happening due to how objects are handled in the architecture of the game. In object-oriented design, the programmer develops a single prototypical object, which is then copied ('instantiated', technically) every time a copy of that object is needed someplace. If you change the prototype object, you change every instance of it throughout the code. So if you install, say, a hacked toaster that talks but doesn't want to actually make toast, you're installing a hacked prototype toaster, which then propagates throughout your game.
Some particularly savvy game modders have developed lists of mods and software that can scan copies of The Sims 2 for hacks and give the option to uninstall them, if that's what the user wants. Props, folks.
I think the polyamory patch is kind of neat, though.
Welcome to 2005 C.E., everyone. I realise that this is late in coming, but I've been unplugged for the past week or so (well, mostly) and away from the console. I'm back in Pittsburgh aftger a five-hour drive home and stop at the office to take care of some problems that were discovered early yesterday morning.
It never fails - go on vacation and all hell breaks loose.
The past few days were spent with Lyssa and Hasufin (who's crashing with Lys until he moves into his new flat in a couple of days) watching Fullmetal Alchemist (yes, my new addiction... I'll stop talking about it when I finish watching it), kicking around DC window shopping, and sitting around talking. At Rialian's suggestion, Lyssa and I checked out a new store near the University of Maryland. They didn't have much there, they'd only been in business for a month or two, but the two folks who run the place were very nice and went out of their way to talk to us. The store is called Spark of Spirit (9937 Rhode Island Avenue; College Park, MD 20740) and is spitting distance from Route 1. If you're in the area, stop in and say 'hi'.
Tell 'em the technomancers sent you.
We also stopped in at one of the more fun kinds of stores - a comic book shop that's basically a warehouse of comics, toys, and collectibles. It was just down the street from Spark of Spirit and is literally crammed floor to ceiling with stuff. If you look hard enough you'll find tapes of ancient wire-fu flicks the likes of which have not been seen since USA cancelled Kung Fu Theatre and trading cards which you've probably never heard of (Speed Racer, Menudo, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, to name just a few of the dozens that Lyssa and I came across), and collector's-only releases of stuff that hasn't been released on DVD yet, such as the pilot movie of The Six Million Dollar Man (yeah, yeah... I bought it). They don't have any current business cards but once I do have one I'll get them linked.
I was up early yesterday morning to try to get stuff down while I was down at Lyssa's, but the problem I mentioned earlier stopped me short. The three of us didn't get a start on the rest of the day until well after 1200 EST, when we drove out to Seven Seas for lunch.
Everything I've had thus far there is excellent. Get whatever you like.
I eventually got on the road about 1600 EST, and promptly got stuck in rush hour traffic on the highway. Four lane highways shouldn't be so jammed that they turn into parking lots, it just isn't right. I got into Pittsburgh around 2030 EST and the office a little after 2100 EST.
Crisis mostly averted.
In a move that makes me wonder exactly how much they had to drink over the New Year, the 109th United States Congress has made it more difficult to investigate ethics violations by members of Congress. Republicans say that this was done to ensure that everyone charged with ethics violations gets the full benefit of due process, the Democrats say that it was done to protect Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tx) from being brought up on more ethics violation charges (apparently, he's not a a very popular individual).
The big telecomm companies of the US are starting to feel threatened, also. Coming hot on the heels of the state government of Pennsylvania mediating the fights between a number of cities and Verizon, which tried to prevent those cities from installing their own broadband nets, more telecomm companies are beginning to throw their weight around. Bellsouth and Cox are actively preventing Layfayette, LA from installing a fibre-optic network that would provide voice, television, and data access to the city's 116k residents. Verizon's hands are tied in Pennsylvania until 2006. The hell of it is, the technology's there to run fibre to each and every house, but it's not being done because it's far more profitable to gouge consumers and try to squeeze out the mom-and-pop ISPs in each area.
Note: Probably not work safe. This is one of the coolest things I've seen in a while. A guy named Scott was burned over 85% of his body at age 15 when the mobile home he was in caught fire and underwent a series of skin grafts taken from remaining epidermal tissue on his chest. One of the grafts eventually grew into a third nipple on the back of his leg, which he has pierced. He went so far as to visit the offices of a radio call-in show to prove that he does in fact have this oddity.
I find this highly disturbing. When last I looked up the definition of the word education, I found among other senses of the word this: "An instructive or enlightening experience."
Life is not a simple thing. The world is a convoluted place and every experience carries a complex shading of light and dark, good and bad, beneficial and harmful. Education, both formal and that of a lifetime of experience, is the thing that lets you discern those nuances because your horizons are broadened through exposure to new experiences and ideas (in the best of all possible worlds, anyway). Things learned are the tools which you use to analyze other ideas. If you limit the concepts that you are exposed to, you limit your ability to navigate life. You can't cut away whole aspects of the world into which you were born without shortchanging yourself - life becomes a two-dimensional cartoon instead of a world full of depth and nuance and subtlty, a delight for the discriminating mind. If you are genuinely afraid that your values will be lost because your mind grows and becomes stronger due to grappling with weighty ideas and the words of genius of years gone by, then perhaps your core values are not quite as strong as you tell yourself. Education requires self-examination as well as reading book after book and ripping your hair out writing paper after paper, analysis after analysis. You can't learn something without your mind changing ever so slightly. Everything you learn changes how you process information. If something is true to you, then after twisting it and turning it and comparing it to other things and examining it from different points of view it will be no less strong nor important to you afterward than it was before. Using your innate intelligence is not a bad thing; you don't have it just so you can get on the right bus every morning. Intelligence is what separates us from animals. It's what has allowed the human race to create the world that we are part of.
You don't live in a microcosm which is your country, people. You are citizens of a world of several billion people, representatives of hundreds of thousands of cultures and bloodlines. You are part of a lush world, teeming with life and ideas, both old and new. Some you agree with, some you don't. That's a part of life. If you don't agree, then think about why you don't agree. If you do, think about why you do. Either way, by blindly accepting you really do yourself a disservice. The world isn't so complex as to cause you to lose your way or become trapped, it's complex because it's the ideal environment for information-processing lifeforms. You live, you learn, you go on. Using the brainpower you've got isn't something to be afraid of, people.
Just great. The mujahedeen are really pissed now.
I'm back in DC with Lyssa, with much having gone on. New Year's Eve at the doss of John and Lara went very well. John and Lara were there (of course) along with Bredmold, Lyssa, Pariah, and myself. We spent the day running around getting stuff necessary for the party that night (like cleaning supplies, stuff to cook with, and Lara, who had to work on the 31st). We visited Sam's Club to get supplies in bulk (like a dozen rolls of paper towels, which we paid for collectively and thus split up as evenly as possible). Lyssa undertook the task of cleaning the bathroom, an operation assisted by two gallons of bleach; I took to the kitchen to scrub the carbon from the enamel as best I could and wipe up the countertop. I made the mistake of doing the dishes by hand because I didn't realise that there was a perfectly workable dishwasher under the cabinets.
My bad.
Picking Lara up proved to be fairly easly to do, because most people were trying to get out of the city as opposed to trying to get into it (the Independence Day phenomenon). I drove because John was tripping on the bleach fumes that permeated the apartment pretty hard. Ten minutes of 4/60 air conditioning (four open windows, sixty miles per hour on the highway) and he was right as rain, thankfully. Lyssa fared much less well, given her asthma, but after some time in the fresh air and a nap and she was all right.
Afterward we headed back to my apartment to get ready, and pick up Pariah on the way to the party. When we finally arrived we made something of a smash entrance. Lyssa and Pariah headed back to the kitchen to start cooking (Lyssa made pizza for everyone, Pariah macaroni and cheese from scratch). I sat back to watch John play Katamari Damacy, which is one of the most surreal games ever made, especially for the PS2 (it has been described as "Your Playstation taking a hit of acid", if you've not yet been exposed to this strange game).
New Year's Eve was quiet and a good time. No crises. No problems. Just food, alcohol and good company. Lots of everything.
Lyssa and I slept in until noon or therabouts on New Year's Day. At some point we switched from the futon to John and Lara's bed (they had been awake since 1000 EST or so) to sleep another few hours, then lounged around until we finally got around to driving to the supermarket to pick up the ingredients for creamed chicken and meatloaf for dinner. We decided to have folks over for dinner that night, you see... Lupa stopped by for a visit but had to leave before lunch was ready. I really need to write down that recipe for creamed chicken...
Dinner that night was baked potatoes and meatloaf (the traditional ground beef/veal/pork mixture) and a soft cheese and crackers to open things up. John and Lara enjoyed it a great deal. More sitting around eating and talking was done that night.
Get the feeling that I enjoy that?
It's been a long weekend, everyone.
We're at John and Lara's apartment celebrating the remaining hours of 2004. Lyssa made pizzas. I made macaroni and cheese (from scratch). There is alcohol and munchies everywhere. Pariah's sitting on the footstool yelling about Lara wanting to reset the router because she'll lose her network connection. I'm hoping to get a game of some sort going soon.
The blueberry mead was excellent, Alexius. Thank you.
Pictures are forthcoming.
The new Cruxshadows album, Fortress In Flames, is quite good. I suggest picking it up if you like synthpop or new-school goth.
It's now 2330 EST. Gentlemen, ladies, and Dougs, start your stopwatches.
We also have no Lupa in the house.
I feel in the mood for retrospection.. 2004 has been a good year, all things considered. I've been out of school for a year now, something I never thought would happen without dropping out of college. I was staff at a convention (Tekkoshocon) for the first time. I've travelled cross-country repeatedly (Washington, DC, Philadelphia, and Rochester, NY), with more trips planned in the future. I found permanant employment after being a temp for better than fourteen months. I've considered marrying a woman for the first time in.. gods, three years? Two years? At any rate, it's something I'd pretty much given up on. Something like that. My body's put on weight for the first time in several years (which many people seem to like but drives me up the proverbial wall). I moved out of the house and into my first apartment. I'm getting ready (off and on) to take an exam for a certification. I got to do hardcore computer security work for the first time ever (and not just as part of being an admin). For the second time ever (the first was the BESM Lain campaign I ran in December of 2003), I got into an RPG campaign (yes, even though I have all of those books, I've only ever used four of them). I even started watching television this year (okay, so it was Iron Chef).
There's a lot of other stuff that I could write about but alcohol and a few NDAs are urging me to not say anything. With that, I'll move on.
I wonder what'll happen tonight. Lots that's safe, I hope.
Not much going on lately.. 2004's winding down, and everyone's getting ready for the new year, be it wrapping up things at work or getting the house ready for a celebration this weekend. I have been thinking about something that the.Silicon.Dragon mentioned while we were at dinner Monday night. As usual, we get into some pretty deep discussions on a variety of topics. One of the reasons that the 412 loves to get together is that we're all information junkies of one sort or another. If it's out there, chances are that at least one of us has either studied it, researched it, or written a whitepaper or a book about it (hi, Ferrett). Silicon asked me (between appetizers and the arrival of the main course) how I was able to remember so many different cases (mostly legal) and specific information about this-and-that. It's simple, really: I write it down.
Not always literally, though. The way my mind works, my memory stores visual and procedural information most readily. It's easier for me to recall watching a dance or using a drill press because a) I watched it happen and b) I watched myself go through the process (watching my hands move, looking at the controls, watching the drill bit raise and lower, observing the position of the object being drilled)). If I want to remember something, I go back into my memory field and re-watch it, and then describe what I see. Similiarly, if I want to memorise something, I either write it down somehow (in a notebook, such as my notes from school) or I think about writing it down (i.e., write it in a notebook inside my memory, engaging my motor centres in a simulation of copying something out verbatim by hand). That way, if I want to recall something (such as a legal case in New York City having to do with an AIDS activist being arrested for using marijuana so that he could keep food and a cocktail of anti-HIV compounds down), I go back and flip through a notebook and then read the text off of the page (in my memory field), just like a lawyer going to a bound volume of legal documentation on a bookshelf, consulting the index to find a case, turning to it, and reading it to someone sitting in the office.
I don't know if this works due to exactly how my mind processes information for long-term storage or if it can be taught. I know that there have been many different mnemonic methodologies taught over the years (such as the memory walk technique that dates back to ancient Greece, which was updated and published by Kevin Trudeau in the 1990's (he did a good job, incidentally)). The principles behind them are really quite simple: You build a set of artificial associations in your mind between things you know quite well (a blender) and a specific fact or set of facts (how DES works). Each key/plug is an icon for the facts attached to it, often with some sort of action to engage the motor centres of the brain for extra accuracy. To memorise something, you build another room inside an imaginary house or castle filled with objects that represent what you memorise. For example, to memorise a shopping list, you'd imagine a kitchen filled with objects and actions that are associated with what you need to buy (coffee pot:coffee:making coffee; faucet;bottled water:filling plastic bottles with water; counter with ants and crumbs all over it:paper towels:wiping up the crumbs and ants). To remember what you have to buy at the store, you'd stop for a moment and 'walk' to the next thing you need and 'perform the action' inside your mnemonic castle.
It takes a little practise and you have to actively train yourself to go through this process whenever you want to memorise something, but once you've got it down it becomes automatic.
What I do when I want to memorise something is that after every paragraph or every few minutes, I imagine a composition book in my lap and a pen in my hand, and I write imaginary notes in the notebook. It works something like this:
Here's a paragraph that I want to remember:
Humans have seen the last of the physical frontier on Earth. The existence of this frontier has been crucial in supporting the progressive notion of western civilization since the birth of Hobbesian modernism and American history. The western frontier provided an escape route from the combined powers of government and science for dissidents, outlaws, and rugged individualists of all stripes. In turn, the frontier provided the state with a goal to accomplish, a piece of nature to whip into submission. Now the people have nowhere to go and the state has nothing better to do than further restrict the people.
This is from an essay written in 1996 by Natan R. Doughty, by the bye.
I'd 'write' the following notes in a mental noteboook that I can review and read from later:
Yes, I know that this is poor note-taking style. This is just how I do it. If you've got a better method, use it.
To memorise something word for word, I write out the whole thing in longhand, taking time to make sure that I get it right, going back and double checking every few paragraphs. Yes, this takes time while reading; I find it works best with fiction. To memorise technical material, I couple it with speed reading techniques and paraphrasing the material as clearly as I can.
If I can do it, anyone can do it. I had to practise it; you'll have to practise it. It's one of the most helpful techniques to know in day to day life. But you have to work at it if you're going to make it useful to you; just knowing how it works doesn't help you if you never try to apply it.
I've noticed a few things about these methods: They force you to have a longer attention span than some people otherwise might. If you're the sort of person who flips from webpage to webpage, or compulsively scans magazines, this will probably drive you nuts for the first few days you work on it. To imprint the information in your memory you really have to immerse yourself in it. I don't know if this would help anyone with ADD to any extent, but if it does please let me know.
To really get the mnemonic castle technique down, you have to sit and really imagine the building that you store your memories in. Take a half-hour a day or so (maybe more if you feel comfortable with it) and imagine a single room every day - two or three new ones every week suffices. The rest of the days, just go on a walk through your castle and re-imagine everything, as if you're exploring it for the first time. The more you revisit memories, the stronger they become and the more readily you'll be able to recall the associated information.
Elwing says that she associates information in much the same was as the memory walk technique, only she uses physical objects in her environment as associative keys for information. She also says that she doesn't have any difficulty when those objects are not around her when she remembers things. She also says that things she writes down stick in her memory field quite well - there are school notes that she never had to study because the information was already imprinted.
Jerry Orbach, rest in peace.
Fans of the game Uplink by Introversion Software may be interesting in knowing that they are now selling a developer's kit for the game so you can write mods for it without having to reverse engineer the game's datafiles. It costs $44.95us.
Xine v1.0 is out. Rejoice.
People searching for the video recordings of the tsunami rolling in should seriously consider installing BitTorrent and using it to download them from this location: http://www.caffeine.nu/tsunami/tsunami-videos.torrent.
I would like to ask that all of my readers take some time out to donate to the Red Cross International Response Fund, which is organising relief efforts for survivors of the tsunami. Please use the following link: https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation-form.asp
In case anyone's curious, Alaska's permafrost is beginning to thaw. Permafrost, by definition, is supposed to be frozen solid permanantly, or at least it was when last I looked up the definition of the term. Buildings are beginning to sink noticably, pipelines are showing signs of metal fatigue (such as stress fractures and ruptures), and roads are buckling in some places. As the ice melts into water, the ground softens and the water runs off, resulting in the ground settling.
Food for thought.
Kurt Harland of InSoc has written a rebuttal to the VH-1 show of a few weeks ago (mirrored here, per instructions at the top of the page).
Kurt's got something to say, I'll let him say it.
The President of the United States is making plans for the Rapture?!
Why does this scare me?
Yesterday afternoon I got a page from Lupa - her neighbor, who seems to think that playing rap music at 110 dB is a polite thing to do, had finally gotten on her last nerve. Because she works night shift and was in dire need of sleep I headed back to the Garden to let her in. I keep my apartment warm, dark, and quiet during the day so she was able to curl up and fall asleep with little trouble. I headed back to work by way of the local bank to put the re-orders that I mentioned yesterday in, with all the hilarity that brought with it. By the time I got home Lupa was fast asleep in my bedroom.
I forgot, however, that I don't make much noise when I move, especially in my own living space, so when I tried to wake her up (as she'd asked me to) I wound up scaring the living hell out of her.
Oops.
I can't say I blame her, really. If I woke up and someone was crouching next to my bed staring at it I'd probably freak out, too. I count myself lucky that she didn't go for my throat.
After we'd gotten that straightened out I got ready to head out to Sushi Tomo to meet up with the 412 crew for holiday dinner, which is something of a tradition for us. Silicon was there, as was Ogervation and Genetik. I brought the box of cookies I'd made for Silicon and Elwing (who was still in DC). We spent some time ragging on Seele, who wasn't able to attend because she's still travelling for the holiday season.
We wound up waiting better than an hour for service, partially because of the number of people in the restaurant, and partially due to the fact that it looked like we were waiting for two more people who weren't going to show. It took about as long for our appetizers to arrive and still longer for the actual sushi. We entertained ourselves and probably profoundly embarassed the staff while we waited. And waited. And waited.
After dinner we drove down to the local Dave and Buster's (to quote Dante of Angst Technologies, "It's a video arcade for adults.") to take over the Pump It Up machine. If you've never played Pump It Up Before, it's a variant of Dance Dance Revolution, only the pads are arranged on the diagonals of a square divided into nine sections (front left, front right, center, back left, back right) and not on the cardinal points (forward, backward, left, and right). Silicon and Genetik are amazing to watch, regularly breaking the one million point mark and usually lasting the entire four-song set. I've played DDR a few times in the past; I'm not very good at it. PIU baffled me completely. I just got used to DDR pads. Trying to play in engineer boots wasn't particularly easy, either. I spent more time watching them and wandering around playing the other games in the arcade, like the shooting gallery (where I started worrying people) and the old-school all-in-one machine (containing a large number of old arcade games, like Joust and Galaxian).
I'm getting old. I got smoked at Defender. Badly.
Before you can ship anything into the United States, it seems, you have to sign an oath stating that your shipment does not contain "obscene or immoral matter, nor any matter advocating or urging treason or insurrection against the United States of America".
Does anyone else find this strange?
There is a new HIV treatment undergoing study at the University of Paris and the Pernambuco Federal University of Recife, Brazil which is showing promise. A vaccine is synthesised from the strains of HIV in a given patient's bloodstream and the dendritic cells of their immune system (dendritic cells, in the context of the human immune system are cells that chew up antigens and present them to the rest of the immune system by placing copies of identifying segments of protein on the outer sides of their cell membranes) by loading the dendritic cells with the HIV particles (giving them a chance to do their job before the dendritic cells are deactivated by the virus' effects) and are re-infused into the patient. After just three vaccinations, the patients' T cells levels stopped dropping and the number of virus particles fell by 80%. After one year, eight of the eighteen patients registered a 90% drop in virus particle counts.
Definitely one to keep an eye on.
This just posted to the Homestead mailing list: The computer manufacturer Tulip has sold its subsidiary company Commodore to Yeahronimo Media Ventures, based out of the US for the cost of 24 million Euro. The deal, as it's written, has to be finalised no later then 2010.
Way to stall for time, guys.
Someone on Slashdot has Sisters of Mercy lyrics in their signature. I can die now.
Congratulations to Cosplay Kate, who is the featured cosplayer in the January 2005 edition of Newtype Magazine!
Another week at work. Well, portion of a week, anyway.
This was a weekend for wearing myself out. I think I spent an average of eight hours out of every day in the car driving from someplace to someplace else by way of the Pennsylvania highway system. The roads were almost devoid of other vehicles, so travel was swift; only sheer distance was the limiting factor. Saturday afternoon I drove out to Lyssa's parents' place for Christmas dinner (comma, 'amazingly large'), somehow completely screwing up plans for that night (dinner at my parents' place). All told, however, things went rather well for Christmas Day. Driving out to the old homestead was uneventful; Lyssa and I spent the evening hanging around with my folks talking and just spending time together.
I think that's what they mean by 'quality time'.
I really didn't get much in the way of stuff for Yule this year, and I'm okay with it. I got the gift that I really needed (my new laptop, Luel). Dataline got me two turtleneck sweaters and some gift cards (Giant Eagle and Sunoco), which she really didn't have to do but I am grateful for them. I plan on using the Sunoco card after work today to fill up on petrol. It's painfully cold outside today (and when did it snow??) and I don't like the idea of running out of gas on a day like today.
Dataline liked the DVDs I got her (Passion of the Christ and National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation), which I'm happy about.
Lyssa's gifts arrived while she was up here, and she was very surprised at what I was able to find for her (to say nothing of the card in Japanese).
Saturday night we invited Lupa over to spend the evening. She was spending Christmas alone this year, so we thought that she'd like to spend some time with us. It wasn't anything very elaborate, we sat around brushing each other's hair (all of us love having our hair played with) and watching Utena and nibbling chocolate, but it was also something that all of us enjoyed. A few pictures were taken of that evening, which I hope I'll be able to finish editing (the colour balance of my camera is screwed, this we were able to agree upon) some time this week.
It's evenings like that which I treasure.
After driving out to Lyssa's parents' place yesterday morning (and another breakfast at the local diner) to drop her off for the trip back down south, I drove to the mall and picked up some more bath towels (which I just don't have many of) and some groceries (which cost far more than they're really worth; thank you, Giant Eagle, for bumping your prices up for the holiday season), I headed home to sleep. After putting the groceries away and picking the bedding up off of the floor, I curled up and slept for the next couple of hours. Around 1700 or 1800 EST, I shook off enough of the sleep to make dinner for myself (I bought a caesar salad and a Meditarranean wrap at Giant Eagle) and then didn't do much of anything because I was too tired.
I went to bed early last night and I think I've caught up on everything.
The hardware hacking group TCNiSO has published instructions for hacking the RCA 245 and 305, and Thomson 290 cable modems. You might want to mirror this page in case RCA decides to break out the DMCA and use it as a sledgehammer.
I keep forgetting that not everyone is working today, or even for the rest of the week. I walked a few blocks to the bank to order more cheques and a new banking card, only to stand in line for nearly 90 minutes because there were only two people on duty today. What should have been a lunchtime jaunt turned into an undertaking that should have been accompanied by a book and possibly a takeup lunch.
Everything's been straightened out, but sheesh...
Earlier in 2004 I stumbled across a most unusual body modification, cosmetic eye implants, much like the silicone nodules that some of the more exotic body modification fans have installed. The Body Modification Ezine is running an article about the quest of Rachael Larratt and Jen Savage to have one implanted. The pair flew to Amsterdam, one of the few countries which considers this sort of surgery legal and went in search of a clinic in late May of 2004. The Retina Total Eye Care facility in Driebergen was selected; it has a reputation for being a trustworthy place to have this procedure performed. The description of the procedure seems very much like going to the hospital to have a minor surgical procedure performed (it reminds me strongly of going to the neurologist to have an MRI performed, down to changing into a hospital gown when it does not seem necessary and having one's head and neck set in a brace to prevent movement). A small amount of liquid of some kind is injected between the layers of the eye's structure, a tiny incision is made, and the cosmetic chip is slid inside. Larratt commented that she wishes that she'd had an eyepatch because the slight assymetry in her eyes made it difficult for her to navigate for a few days following the implantation. There was some soreness as the local anesthetic wore off, and some reddening of the sclera due to surgical trauma. A week-long regimen of antibiotic drops aside, there was no aftercare. Cost for the whole procedure was roughly $900us.
Check this article out, if only for the pictures of Larratt's new hardware.
The thing I find most striking about this, given my favourite genre of literature, is that the clinic was in a small shopping mall. In cyberpunk stories (and the occasional game) it's not uncommon to read about characters strolling down to the mall to a surgical boutique and having some kind of cosmetic modification performed. This is it.
I'm back in Pittsburgh and dead fsck(1)ing tired. I'll write stuff tomorrow, and possibly post the pictures I'd taken if I remember to.
I'm not sure if I should be suspicious of this or not - John Kerry is planning to withdraw his concedence of the 2004 election. He's going to stand and fight it. Since rumours that Triad Systems, another manufactuer of electronic voting equipment, have gotten around that there was some funny stuff seen with respect to their gear (like people swapping parts out and leaving odd notes with obvious falsehoods ("These are the old voting results but tell everyone who asks that they're attendence records")).
I'm going to bed. Good night, everyone, and happy holidays. I'll give Morpheus your best.
Joyous Yule, everyone.
I've been mistaken for a female twice this morning by Lyssa's family.
Damn, I'm good.
Joyous Yule, everyone.
Well, today was a long one. The last day before the Christmas holiday is always hectic. Last minute things to do, places to go, and people to see. I got up early this morning to get ready and head out to Lyssa's homestead, where she's in town for the weekend. Even after a quick stop back home to get a package that I'd forgotten, I made it in good time (a little over an hour one way), only to find that Lyssa was still feeling poorly after finals. I did what I could, but only time and rest will really help. Shortly after arriving Lyssa and I drove down to Sheetz to get cash and then to the local diner (your classic small-down restaurant, complete with good, fast service, inexpensive food (calling it 'cheap' does it a great disservice), and lots of seating). For $13us we had two full meals, including soup and coffee. Fans of The West Wing will probably recognise the location in a heartbeat.
We spent the day sitting around talking and watching a bit of television, but neither of us were really feeling well. This past week wiped me out; I haven't really been sleeping well and the added stress of trying to get everything at work wrapped up has been wearing me down. I napped for a little while at Lyssa's but didn't really catch up on my rest. I left shortly after 1400 EST because I had a few more places to go before dinner with my parents tonight.
I called John and Lara to see if they were in, because were were going to exchange gifts tonight, and made plans to see them later in the afternoon. My first stop was actually a supermarket to pick up cold medication (in case I caught whatever Lyssa has) and thumbtacks for Dataline so she can finish hanging up decorations. Finding everything was easy; I still had to wait in line at the checkout for a good 45 minutes because everyone and their backup was buying enough food for two or three weeks (seeing two filled carts was not unusual at the store today). Caught without a book, I stood and read tabloids until I got to the cashier.
Most of my brain is booted back up at last after that harrowing experience.
John and Lara presented me with a pair of gifts, a home-made apple pie and cinnamon ice cream from Bayani, which I brought with me back to the homestead to share with my family. Both are amazingly good, and the time spent making them really shows.
We hung out and talked for a while, catching up on what's been going on and arranging plans for the New Year, but all too soon they had to head to Lara's family's place and I had to return to the homestead. We packed up our stuff and headed out around the same time.
The homestead is looking pretty good. Dataline put up lights outside and finished decorating the tree. I returned the (huge) cookie tin that I was storing my gift cookies in and the electric mixer, and then sat down for a cup of coffee to swap stories. I filled Dataline in on the Yule gathering earlier this week and then we set about making the place ready for Christmas dinner.
Unfortunately, the potato pierogi went bad, leaving us with only the cabbage filled pierogi for dinner. Plan B consisted of french fries, along with the traditional fried fish. I forgot how Christmas dinner tasted (it's easy to when it's only once a year) and everything that led up to my moving out earlier this year.
For the first time since I got here, it felt like family.
After dinner we sat around watching The Food Network in a cover of our old Saturday morning ritual. Just sitting there talking and laughing about everything. You have to laugh to keep from crying, after all.
As I mentioned earlier, I shared the pie and ice cream with everyone for dessert, which they raved over.
Before I left I helped Dataline set up the last of the decorations and found the Christmas wapping stuff under the stairs (it'd fallen behind everything else under there and had gone missing), then packed up and headed back to the Garden.
On a sour note, a North Carolina homeless shelter evicted a pregnant woman and her three sons after the uncle of her children paid them a visit. And no, I seriously doubt that the Christ would have thrown a preganant women and her children out on the street for any reason.
3.6 gigacalories of gingerbread goodness! Those wacky folks at Mediatinker have found one of the more unusual gingerbread sculptures of 2005, the guts of a computer done entirely in gingerbread, icing, and candy. Clearly visible are three expansion cards (video, network, and sound, I'm guessing from the image), RAM, the CPU and cooling rig, power regulation capacitors, and a few chips on the motherboard.
Yes, it's early. Yes, I'm on my first cup of coffee. I think it's kinda neat nonetheless.
Last night was a night to get stuff done. I did a little studying (as much as I could, anyway), put the ornaments on my tree (my Yule tree isn't going to be a Geekmas tree this year because all of the stuf I have that would fit on a tree is still at my old lab), washed the dishes from the hurried cooking I did a few days ago, and cleaned up the countertop a little. On the agenda for tonight is finishing cleaning and running the sweeper, cleaning the bathroom, picking up and putting away laundry (something I'm notoriously bad at) and wrapping the remainder of my Yule gifts. I gave Lupa her gift last night (volume one of Under the Glass Moon and two CDs, one from Lyssa and one from myself). I think we've addicted her to it...
That was about the extent of what I accomplished yesterday. It wasn't much but it was enough to put a dent in things.
Anime and manga fans are no doubt familiar with the phenomenon of mecha: Giant robots, often piloted by humans. They've been a dream of fans for years (who wouldn't like a vehicle that turns into a humanoid and is powerful enough to throw a minivan a block or two?); the US government has been researching their construction for a few years now, to see if they would really be feasible for deployment on the battlefield, but so far the research hasn't provided much for the $50mus they've put forth at it. 26-year old Carlos Owens has put $15kus of his own money into building an operational mecha and has shown more results than the think tanks that are tackling the same projects. The mecha Owens is constucting is an exoskeleton, basically a suit of armour that amplifies the strength of its wearer several thousand times by using a system of hydraulic actuators. Owens is a former heavy equipment mechanic in the US Army who has a taste for huge projects, and really has the hacker spirit. Nevermind the fact that the big boys can't make it work, he knows how to get results.
I'm impressed. Highly impressed. I'd love to see this in action.
Now here are some Barbie dolls that I wouldn't mind collecting. Especially the Latex Barbie.
That's a switch.
Iris is going on tour again, and working on a third album.
The Yule celebration at House Pendragon was a hit, per usual. I got there much, much later than I'd intended, mostly due to a comedy of errors, but was there in time for the last of the food and a lot of sitting around talking and swapping stories. The evening went something like this:
I left work early yesterday (not too much so to have enough time, but a bit earlier than usual) to get to the store to ship out the last of my Yule gifts, which took a good half-hour or so, most of which was spent waiting for the guy behind the counter to print out the shipping labels and get them scanned in to the package management system. I'm still trying to figure out why that took so long - I suspect it's because the system the records are uploaded to was under heavy load due to so many shipping orders at this time of year, but I can't be sure. By the time I got back to the Garden it was 1800 EST. I threw my work stuff off and began putting together the casserole I was bringing to the party, only to discover that I needed an electric mixer to make the batter. I couldn't find my egg whisk (still can't), so my backup plan went out the window. I had to drive all the way back to my old Lab to borrow their mixer, then drive back to my flat. With the first layer of the casserole in the oven, I then found out that the can of what I thought had been cream of chicken soup was actually kidney beans. This necessitated another trip to the supermarket.
And another half hour of getting stuck in traffic. And another twenty minutes of standing in line. And two minutes of broken-field running at top speed through the packed aisles.
And the casserole was still in the oven, on "warm" but in the oven none the less.
By this time, it was going 1930 EST. I started putting together the filling for the casserole, assembled the whole shebang, and put it in the oven for a half hour, then went to get dressed and get gifts together for everyone.
Then Lupa called, wanting to borrow my digital camera.
That actually wasn't a problem, it gave the casserole a chance to cool so it could be transported safely.
Then I dashed out the door and discovered that 'lex had left a message in my voice mail asking where I was, if I was coming, and whether or not I was okay.
I still got there.
The house was packed with folks lounging around, finishing dinner and talking. The turkey, alas, had already been picked over pretty thoroughly, but there was still a lot of everything else, and all of it was good. The casserole didn't go over very well because everyone was full, but the folks who did try it said that it was quite good.
Oh, well. It happens.
A lot of jokes were made and pictures taken, and a lot of tales were swapped.
I got Alexius a bottle of spiced wine for Yule, and TJ and Andrea gift cards. Alexius got me a "Know your roots" t-shirt (with the NES controller on the front); TJ made me a "Home sweet apartment" cross-stitch in a frame (which I've put on my home entertainment centre); Diane gave me a scented candle and a small sachet of herbs.
Thank you, everyone.
The state of Illinois is going ahead with implementation of ICMHP, as I've mentioned in the past. All children up to the age of 18 in the state of Illinois will undergo mandatory mental health screenings and mandatory medication if they are determed to fall outside of 'normal' parameters. Expecting mothers will also undergo psychological evaluations up to one year after giving birth (to arrest occurrances of Munchausen by proxy, ostensibly). Standards of social and emotional development and stability will be added to the lists of academic development standards enforced by state law.
Does this sound to anyone else like forcing people into a single standardised state of existence, ala Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut? What if someone's eccentricities (for example, teaching oneself to write with either hand when they are perfectly capable of using only their dominant hand) are interpreted as symptoms of a mental disorder? There is also evidence that mental instabilities can lead to advances in science and art.
This scares me.
No bad dreams last night, thankfully. The snow is mostly gone and it's a lot less icy than I thought it was going to be, at least so far. It is, however, bitterly cold (13 degrees Farenheit when last I checked). Exposed fingers go numb within second, which makes using the prepaid pump at the gas station a painful experience at best.
The stuff happening at the US base in Cuba is still going on, and now some are claiming to be FBI agents when they're really military to cover it up. Interrogators at the Guantanamo Base are working over detainees with some pretty hefty techniques such as strobe lights (I wonder how many seizures they've had so far) and sleep deprivation (as someone who used to pull five and six days awake at a stretch, you don't get too much useful information after a few days - just read the variable names from my undergrad coding projects) but they're misrepresenting themselves to shift the blame (isn't falsely claiming to be an FBI agent a felony?). Other techniques, some bordering on the hazardous (lowering the air temperature of interrogation chambers to the point where hypothermia is possible, raising air temperatures to the point where heat exhaustion causes unconsciousness) are also reported to be in use at this time. Some even more gristly techniques, such as inserting lit cigarettes into prisoners' ears (I think I saw that in a Charles Bronson movie years and years ago) are also being applied.
Is it just me, or is compassion for people (whether or not you're fighting against them in some form or another) being steadily forced out of human consciousness? I thought the Geneva Convention was supposed to keep stuff like this from happening.
Interestingly, the United States of America ratified all but two protocols of the Geneva Convention.
Go, Jeri! (No registration required)
Thank you, Telerama, for disabling reception of e-mails destined for 'telerama.lm.com', which you have so faithfully supported for the past ten years and not telling anyone. Ninety-one e-mails have bounced in the past ten days and I haven't even realised it. Now I have to get back in the good graces of a number of mailing lists that I thought had only gone quiet for the weekend.
On the bright side, most of my spam is suffering the same fate.
Interestingly, they just sent out an e-mail to all of their customers talking about just this. Thanks, guys.
The cookies went over very well at work. I'm very pleased.
More bad dreams last night.
I think this one hit me around 0500 EST today. I got up and went through my daily routine, then laced on a pair of roller skates (old-school, four wheels on the corners, not in-line skates) (maybe I've been listening to too much InSoc lately), threw on my backpack and hat, and headed out the door to go to work one fine summer morning.
That right there should have been my clue that this was a dream.
Somehow, I made it all the way to work (the exact opposite direction of the way I go), someplace in the suburbs and on the other side of a very, very large hill (which would make anyone with three brain cells to hook together in series stop and say "I'm not skating down that") without killing myself and skipped up the stairs to go to work. I sat in the office of either a manager or a cow-orker for a couple of hours shooting the bull, as techies without anything to fix or break are wont to do until I realised that I had to get to class at Pitt. I further realised that I hadn't been to that class in over a month, and finals were fast approaching. I stood up to dash out the door, only to realise that I had been in such a rush to get to work that I'd skated the whole way there without any pants on, only a pair of dark blue boxer shorts.
Yes, the Doctor has officially had his first "go to work in your underwear dream."
I couldn't very well go to class in my underwear, not when I had the audacity to not even go to class all semester... a quick call to my folks' place with an RFP (request for pants) and a half hour later (and it really did feel like a half-hour subjectively, complete with pacing (well, skating back and forth), fretting, and wondering what my professor would say when I arrived). Dataline showed up with a pair of shorts and suitably clad I took off down the road in a vain attempt to get to the Pitt campus.
The dream scared me so thoroughly for some bizarre reason that I shook myself awake around 0535 EST (I make it a point to look at the clock whenever I wake up) and tossed and turned, all but tied up in my PJs for a good half-hour until I finally went to sleep again.
The time until I fell asleep again was filled with my addled brain trying to figure out what I was going to say to my professor and how I was going to handle going to class and working full-time. The dream was so vivid and hit so many buttons deep inside me that I actually thought that I had to go to class today and that the dream was about class.
The residual Oz Factor has finally faded.
Lupa, did you make Morpheus angry or something?
This is cute: Someone made a snow alien.
As much as I have problems with the war in Iraq, this is pure spin control: Donald Rumsfeld is getting hammered because he's using a machine to sign condolence letters to the families of soldiers killed in action. What the article doesn't tell you is that these machines are commonly used in the US Government for signing letters like this. The folks in government just don't have time every day to sign a few hundred to a few thousand letters every day and still get other stuff done (no jokes about nothing coming of all that work, please, those are understood). To that end, a few companies have developed machines that use ballpoint pens and a sort of stencil to copy signatures en masse.
I wonder who Rumsfeld pissed off....
There's a pretty poor article about Gregory Herns, who cracked a number of computers on NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre network a while back. Herns has been sentenced to six months in jail for compromising a number of systems while searching for enough disk space to store ripped movies, a common activity. NASA technicians spent months wiping and rebuilding each machine, which is understandable if you're actually doing any forensic analysis of the compromised computer systems. Assistant US Attorney Greg Nyhus described the situation as "not like firing up your Macintosh or Apple where you push a button and wait six minutes for the thing to boot."
It's a lot more complex than that, but it doesn't take months to boot a cracked Linux box back up. My record for setting up a Fedora Core 1 machine (from installation to fully locked down) is twenty minutes.
Patrick Volkerding is doing much better.
The snow was even worse this morning - there are at least three inches of snow on everything right now. It took me a half hour to warm the car up, sweep the snow off of the windscreens, headlamps, roof, and air intakes (on the front of the car), and chip the layer of ice off of the windscreens. The side windows are still frozen shut. The temperature's supposed to reach 40 degrees Farenheit tomorrow, but what worries me is the temperature plummeting after the snow has had a chance to melt. The prospect of navigating a sheet of ice to traverse the stairs of my apartment complex does not particularly appeal to me.
Congratulations to the First Child and Wya for the success of charmed.hu which is one of the top 100 most visited web sites in Hungary!
Strategy First, the game publisher that handled Uplink by Introversion has filed chapter 11, reporting a debt in excess of $5mus.
Obligations done, today's been one of those "Don't wanna, don't hafta" days. This morning after breakfast I was content to lounge around and read. And read. And read some more. And contemplate playing more Uplink, but only for a moment. Lupa stopped by briefly to check on things because she'd had a rough night, but later today she and I headed out to prowl the bookstores in the area for a while. We wandered for a few hours and found some interesting things, but not much to speak of. At least, Lupa didn't.
Fans of 1980's cartoons probably recall a fairly obscure series called Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers, which has been described as having the best qualities of spaghetti westerns and space operas with a dose of four-colour morality thrown in. (trivia: Jerry Orbach did the voice of Zachary Fox). As we searched the DVD shelves at Borders for Wolf's Rain I stumbled across volume 2 of Galaxy Rangers on DVD, released by Koch Vision. Volume 1 is out on DVD, too. Needless to say, the volume I found went home with me this afternoon.
I also stumbled across the novelisation of the BBC's Doctor Who: Scream of the Shalka. That has been added to my library, also.
It's been snowing for much of today and hasn't let up yet. The ground is uniformly covered with a layer of fluffy white snow, and the sky was a pleasantly cool shade of grey. I can sit and watch the snow coming down for hours. There's something about driving through the snow that just pulls me outside without even thinking about it.
Come to think about it, I did have a rather strange dream last night. I was sitting in the Garden reading a book and watching the tiny white mouse that I was sharing the flat with run around on the floor near the walls. He was dodging in and out of boxes and over cables as mice are wont to do when they are trying to find the fastest exit out of an enclosed space. I soon discovered exactly why it was so hot to get out of the Garden - a spider the size of a softball methodically closing upon it, crawling first one way and then another until it was within striking range. Once it was within a foot or so of the dream-mouse, it poured the gas on and chased the mouse down behind a cardboard box. I heard a single shriek loud enough to make me jump and shake myself awake, still echoing in my ears as the spider pounced on the little mouse and sank its fangs into some part of it as deeply as they would go.
Last night it was brought to my attention that the latest revision of Clam Antivirus, which I run on Lucien to scan incoming and outgoing e-mail for viral content, had been updated to fix a potential problem (for the maintainers) involving checking for and downloading virus signature updates. Specifically, it was getting to the point where the sites containing the updates were being hammered flat by so many thousands of machines trying to get updates so often. If installations that ran automatic updates didn't clean up their collective act soon, those IP addresses would be banned utterly, meaning they'd be SOL in terms of keeping up to date.
Not wanting Lucien to be SOL I downloaded v0.80 of ClamAV last night, compiled it, and updated the installation on Lucien. And of course promptly broke e-mail reception for all of the domains on the Network. After downloading and installing the latest revision of Qmail Scanner (which sits between the mail transfer subsystem, the antivirus software, and the antispam software) in case things had changed inside ClamAV in such a way that it was no longer compatible with the older version, I thought I'd fixed it. Until I checked up on Lucien this evening to see why I had been recieving so little e-mail lately; his system logs were full of warning messages to the effect of "corrupt or unknown clamd scanner error or memory/resource/perms problem". After plugging that error into Google I found the glitch (clamd, the part of ClamAV that runs in the background) was not running with the access permissions of the rest of the scanning system. By editing the clamd.conf file and setting it to run as a user named 'qscand' the error messages seem to have stopped.
Here's hoping that things are back to normal by tomorrow morning.
Goodbye, Crusher. Maybe we'll run into one another next time around.
It's been four years, and it's still hard to deal with.
Today's been one of those "gotta get stuff done" days. I packed up a total of six giftboxes of yummies, got two of them down to the post office to ship, made breakfast, went grocery shopping, did my laundry, made Cincinatti Chili for dinner, and prowled around looking for another ergonomic keyboard for work. I think I'll keep borrowing my boss' until I find one that isn't $50us.
Thank you again for the cocoa, First Child - it went well in the chili this evening.
Is anyone else starting to wonder when the last time this was done?
This is for the birds, people... a study released by Cornell University yesterday shows that 44% of the population of the United States (I'd like to see the numbers on that one - how big a sample did they take and how did they take it?) is all for removing the civil rights of Muslims living in America. Registering one's address with USgov.. monitoring the activities in mosques (this is being done to a number of religious groups right now, incidentally).. infiltration of civic organisations (COINTELPRO, anyone? (check out the FOIA documents if you don't believe it))... if they really wanted to piss off the Muslim population of this country, this is how to do it.
The 1980's had lots of things going for it: The advent of personal computing, the heyday of the BBS scene, new-wave music, high school flicks, cyberpunk sci-fi was new and edgy... but it also had the pall of the cold war hanging over it like a battleship dropped from low earth orbit. As kids, we didn't know if the Russians were going to lob a couple of megatonne nuke-bearing ICBMs at the US of A and make a couple of major cities glow in the dark for the next few centuries. To that end, the US government began to research anti-missle technology, to prevent such a strike from taking place. All sorts of news articles and fluff pieces were written and shown on PBS (public broadcasting) to hype the benefits of it.. and tell us about the dangers of it if the Wrong People(tm) beat us to it. There was just one thing about the Strategic Defense Initive (the so-called Star Wars programme):
It was an utter flop.
Cost overruns ran into the billions of dollars and nothing workable really came of it but some nifty articles in Popular Mechanics and Omni Magazine. The programme was dropped and forgotten, an embarassment to the US.
As much as I'm fascinated by the 1980's, I really don't see why anyone would want to revisit a lot of it; SDI is pretty high on that list. And yet, George W. Bush has thrown his support behind SDI v2.. even though the first tests were, as before, completely screw-ups. The projected deadline of this system being up and running before the end of 2004 is rapidly approaching, but there are no signs of success anytime soon. Successful tests in the lab and simulations do not count - it's what you can make work in the field, two miles above the ground when your surveillance satellite constellation has detected and verified a launch and your lifespan has shrunk from decades to mere hours (if that).
It seems like everything these days is being wired to monitor who's using what and what they look like. EPIC, the Electronic Privacy Information Centre has discovered that US Postal Service self-serve stations photograph their users and retain the images for a period of thirty days. Take a look at the .pdf file lined at the top of that page for the full details of what they've managed to dig up with the Freedom of Information Act.
The powers that be might be scared to death of peer-to-peer networking technologies, but when you get right down to it you can't kill an idea once it's loose without killing everyone. Take, for example, a peer-to-peer app written in only 15 lines of code by Ed Felton. Felton's code was written so that only a small network of systems could be sharing files with one another, but the principles are the same. The algorithms used here could easily be adapted to construct much larger shared networks with much more in the way of functionality.
This reminds me a lot of the folks who were competing to see who could write the RSA encryption algorithm in the fewest lines of Perl code.
Way to go, Firefox! If you get the 16 December 2004 issue of the New York Times, you'll find the full-sized two-page Get Firefox ad on pages A24 and A25.
The FAA and FCC are collaborating in
Brian Salcedo, one of the three guys who cracked the network of the Lowe's
Home Improvement chain of stores
Daniel J. Bernstein, computer security advocate and college professor, infamous for his opinions of software licensing, creator of too many software packages to count, has done it again. Bernstein taught a courst at UIC called UNIX security holes, in which techniques to find and fix programmatic vulnerabilities were taught. In the course, the source code to a number of open source projects was analysed; the final involves finding heretofore unannounced bugs in code. Here is the directory of what they found. Sadly, most of the class is expected to fail due to how hard the course was.
R.U.Serius, former member of the crew behind the now defunct glossy magazine Mondo 2000 has done it again: The columns he's edited this month deal with life extension and keeping your mind going. I've been paging through them, and there's a lot of good information in there. Transhumanists and folks interested in keeping their minds going as long as organically possible (you know who you are) might want to take notes.
In other news, George W. Bush has announced that plans are in place to disable the global positioning system satellite constellation in the event of an emergency. The GPS satnet is used by hundreds if not thousands of people and vehicles to keep track of where they are on the face of the planet (with less accuracy than before because the continual state of war the US is in has forced the reactivation of the function of the satellites which screws with the accuracy of the computed coordinates for civilian recievers; what they don't seem to realise is that when you're talking about using GPS to guide a nuclear warhead, you don't need accuracy down to the meter but to the half-kilometer or so) and is essential for navigation. There are also plans in place for procedures that would disable access of 'other parties' to the GPS constellations of the United States and other countries (such as the Galileo project planned by the European Union). Incidentally, the 'selective availability' function of GPS has been reenabled, to the contrary of the article. Just after 9/11, I spent some time experimenting with my own GPS unit and compared the coordinates of my old Lab to those I'd taken a few months before (after buying the unit) and they were off.
I'm really getting angry with Dell Computers.
I ordered my new laptop from them a few weeks ago, and modulo some problems with the first unit they'd sent me, everything's been running smoothly with Luel since then. However, part of my purchase order was a memory expansion - an extra 256MB of RAM, bringing him up to 768MB. For some reason, I have yet to discover why because every
