/usr/bin/strings /dev/swap | grep '/interesting stuff/'

I'm holding together from the weekend in DC. I've scheduled an appointment for a root canal this afternoon, which I'm not looking forward to but have to have peformed if I'm going to be able to go to that conference at the end of next week. Work's been kicking my ass lately; I spent most of Monday on the phone with the home office trying to get one of our servers which is bouncing like a tennis ball stable and usable, to no avail. There's a whole, long saga about this which I'm not in a position to talk about publically. Suffice it to say that you should be very, very careful with the business partners and third party companies that you pick to assist you in your business ventures, and don't be afraid to bitch, cry, scream, and even sue their butts off to get what you are paying good money for.

Yesterday morning I dropped my car off at the garage for maintenance and had the shuttle (they've got a fleet of vans that will happily drop you off anywhere in the area afterward) drop me off at my old Lab, whereupon I set about excavating the two monsterous HP servers that were my severance from my last steady run of employment (2001-2002). We're in a jam at work at we need heavy iron, fast. Those two servers aren't much now in terms of CPU speed but they're not even close to fully tricked out, so we can turn them into monsterous boxes with only a little cash expenditure at this time. After digging them out (and I do mean 'digging' - they were so buried under stuff that had been moved onto that floor due to remodelling only the very top of the stack of boxen could be seen) I broke for lunch to wait for Tartan to arrive with his jeep.

We reconfigured a dolly kept in the garage for just such emergencies and maneuvered the two servers through the garage and lifted them into the back of the vehicle, after which we headed for the office to try to catch up a little before the meeting at the hosting company in Pittsburgh that the company will be moving some of its operations to. This was delayed for several hours due to what can best be described as a massive fuck-up on the part of our current hosting provider. The folks in the office and I spent a good hour tracking down the problem, to no avail. Puff went to bat for us with the company while the rest of us sat around chewing our nails and considering passing the hat to purchase a case of Guinness (registration for proof of age required). At last the server was up and running once more, and the three of us (Tartan, Puff, and myself) set out with the servers in tow.

Much of the afternoon was spent waiting for Skitch, who runs the facility, to get back to us because he was on the phone for most of it with more pressing matters to take care of (can't say I blame him, I'd do the same thing). We took the fifty cent tour of the facility (damn...), walked a couple of blocks in either direction to get coffee Fedora Core 3 on the box. There's a serious bug in the installation software regarding software RAID that I've only been able to work around by not setting up any software RAID/meta-disk devices at all, nor configuring any partitions as 0xFD (soft-RAID partitions). I've had to set up the soft-RAID metadevices entirely by hand, after the system's been set up and secured. It's a royal pain in the ass, and I really wish that the Fedora Core developers would get around to fixing this. I've only filed four bug reports in a year's time.. the bug lies in the fact that the installer doesn't wait for the meta-devices to finish synchronising before it tries to format them. Because of this, the installer tries to format an invalid 'disk' and dies.

Earlier this week, I made an appointment with Doctor Schrenker (2901 Mount Royal Boulevard; Glenshaw, PA; 15116; telephone number 412-486-8991) to have the molar I'd broken examined; I'd made the appointment knowing that I'd have to have a root canal, in all probability. I left work early to go to his office and dropped off the dental x-rays that the dentist in Maryland had taken last weekend. Dr. Schrenker and I discussed possible avenues of treatment, such as having the tooth extracted and replaced with an implant or a prosthetic bridge. I'm not wild about having a bridge made because I've seen what happens when they are worn for too long; someone I know had one for most of her life and wound up losing all of her teeth because they place a lot of structural stress on the surrounding teeth, and eventually the connective tissues wear out and give way. The dental implant route sounds good to me, save that I'm being sent to a conference in two weeks' time and my jaw won't have time to fully healed. Being several hundred miles away from home if something bad happens doesn't appeal to me. For the forseeable future, that option's out.

The procedure wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be, but it was far from pleasant. In a nutshell (and I'll try to not be too graphic about it), Dr. Schrenker shot seven or eight syringes worth of novocaine into the nerve trunk in the left-hand side of the mandible throughout the entire procedure and knocked the entire quadrant of my face offline. I lost count about an hour into the procedure, so I really don't know how much he used, I was only thankful that he'd taken the whole complex out. Then he drilled a working port through the existing filling and began the process of removing the pulp and nerves from the inside of the tooth. I don't know how long this took, but it felt like a fair whack of the history of the moon. I noticed that he used a few dental picks and an entire set of very tiny files, many shaped like the drill bits you'd use when fabricating a circuit board to dig the organic structure out of my molar. At some point, we ran into an unforseen difficulty in the procedure, which I am given to understand that most folks won't run into. The difficulty was the fact that the tooth in question has an extra root (and thus, an extra root canal), and that the root canals are much longer than expected. One of the difficulties lie in locating a set of dental files/drill bits that were long enough to reach all the way to the bottoms of the canals. Before setting to work he pressed the standard issue latex rubber dam over the tooth, which not only catches the flying bits of pulp and nerve tissue but also keeps one from breathing bone dust, pulverised enamel, and the flying mist of saline solution used to irrigate the insides of the tooth. They're also damned uncomfortable and tend to make your jaws sore after a while.

A few times during the procedure, he injected novocaine directly into the nerve through the working port he'd drilled. This is probably going to be done to you if you have a root canal done, and let me tell you, you're going to about jump out of your skin the first two times it's done. It might not be painful, exactly (it wasn't for me), but the feeling of something hard and thin poking around inside a tooth is enough to make you catch your breath. It's something that you'd best handle, however - it's for the best.

Once the tooth was hollowed out, he packed it with calcium hydroxide, which is supposed to clean out the remaining organic material and assist in the healing process, and then plugged the working port with a temporary filling. Another appointment's been made for next Monday to replace the filling with a more permanant compound (probably ceramic) and affix a cap to the tooth.

I discovered something about my insurance today, which I wish I'd known about in Maryland, which would have saved me a hell of a lot of trouble. My corporate insurance includes a dental plan along with medical coverage. This is good. The company doesn't use Social Security numbers to identify its policy holders. This is good from a security standpoint, because it makes it harder for your identity to be stolen if someone gets hold of your insurance card or paperwork. As many insurance companies are doing these days, they're blacking out the first couple of digits of the policy holder's ID number (SSN or not). This is good. If, however, you try to use your policy (as I did), they're going to try to look up your SSN in the company's database and not find it, because they didn't use a real SSN. This is bad. As far as they're concerned, that policy doesn't exist. That's very bad, because they'll make you front the money for everything. That not only is bad, it downright sucks. Thankfully, the staff at Dr. Schrenker's helped me figure out what was going on, and got everything straightened out with the policy. Now I've got to contact the dentist in Maryland and get more paperwork faxed up to me so I can fill out the paperwork myself and hopefully be reimbursed.

I've been home since 1700 EST or so, after a quick trip to the supermarket to pick up more food that's soft enough to eat without having to worry about my new dental work. I've started taking the painkillers that I was prescribed when I was in Maryland, and aside from a little discomfort here and there I'm not feeling any pain. The painkillers, contrary to popular knowledge, doesn't have any pseudo-psychedelic effects on me. They just take the pain away.

So, now I've got to sit tight until Monday. I should be good to go for the conference.

Rumours about this have been going around the US troops who've come home for months. Interesting that it's finally made the newswires.

On the way down to Maryland last night I stopped off for a soft pretzel and coffee at one of the maintenance plazas to keep my blood sugar up, and about ten minutes out from Midway felt a sickening "crunch!" that sank right to the pit of my stomach and sat there sullenly. At the time I could only suspect, but the emergency visit to the dentist this morning confirmed it: While I had not broken a filling, I did break a molar.

Okay... just to catch everyone up on how events transpired today, I called the customer service line of my dental insurance company late last night after getting in and found two dentists who accepted my insurance within a ten minute drive of Lyssa's place. While I slept this morning, Lyssa called an emergency dentist and hashed out details with with about my insurance plan and how bad of a situation I'd wound up in. The price tag for the consultation was considerable - they didn't take my insurance and would want me to pay the whole thing, better than $450us, up front.

I very nearly accepted those terms, but remembered that I have dental coverage (two policies, actually) and called one of the places I found last night. I got an appointment for 1030 EST this morning, and after some fumbling around managed to find the place (on the ground floor of an apartment building along with a barber shop, an investment consultant, and a few other places, oddly enough). After an x-ray and general checkup, the diagnosis was made: I didn't break the filling, but I did break the innermost remaining part of the tooth. There's only a 10% probability that the tooth itself is going to fold soon due to the size of the filling (bloody huge - I'm going to scan the X-ray and post it). My usual dentist back in Pittsburgh, Dr. Schrenker, told me that it'd need fixed permanantly one way or another within three years' time, and it is well within that time period. I am, however, going to need a root canal, a buildup, and a cap to get the tooth back in shape. The pulp of the tooth isn't exposed, so I'm safe for now, but better safe than sorry.

The projected recovery time of the root canal is about a day, so if I can get it scheduled soon, I'll be back on my game in time for not only Tekkoshocon but the conference I'm attending in about two weeks. I've got a pair of prescriptions for an antibiotic geared toward the sorts of bacteria in the mouth that go in for the roots of teeth to grow out of control and for a painkiller (which I hope that I don't have to use at all) that I tried to get filled tonight but wasn't able to because the 24 hour CVS' pharmacy is closed.

Seeing as how I've been there at 0130 EST a few times to pick up other prescriptions, I'm wondering what the heck happened. I'm not arguing too strenuously, however, because I'm not in any pain and doing pretty well at this moment.

After the good news from the dentist (sarcasm only partially intended) Lyssa and I met up with Rialian at Dream Wizards, one of the oldest gaming stores on the east coast. Their selection's broad, covering the newest and the oldest stuff, but limited (they've got a little of everything but not a lot of older stuff), and they also stock stuff from the Zendik Collective and a cross section of anime and manga related stuff, including imported soundtracks (with some rare ones, no less) and artbooks (several Utena artbooks among them). They also have extensive collections of Steve Jackson Games card games, including starter sets and boosters of Illuminati: New World Order; there's also a lot of Netrunner stuff there (though nothing from the Proteus expansion, which only I seem to have heard of).

A carefully chewed dinner was had at Mosaic Cuisine just down the block. If you've never had a waffle sandwich before, this is the place to start. Their prices are a little on the steep side ($7us for a waffle sandwich with chips or cole slaw), but quite tasty. I especially recommend the strawberry and caramel crepes for dessert. We also stopped at the Harry and David store (!!!) to nose their selection, which is considerable. If you can afford their wares, I highly recommend.. well.. most anything they carry.

Anthropology and archeology buffs who've been following the story of the discovery of the remains of ancient humanoids, which many are jokingly calling 'hobbits' on the island of Flores might want to take a look at this article on the topic. The findingings of the joint Australian/Indonesian team suggest more and more that the remains are not from deformed modern humans but an ancestral species of homo sapiens sapiens. Unfortunately, some of the remains were badly damaged while in the care and study of one Teuku Jacobs of Gadjah Mada University. As if that weren't enough, one of the jawbones suffered a poor attempt at reconstruction by Jacobs, which has left many facepalming. On the up-side, examination of the skulls leads researchers to conclude that the brains that once were suspended within the braincases was quite large for its time and highly complex. Tools found along with the skeletons also suggest that the 'hobbits' were intelligent and capable of designing useful tools and planning, reinforced by other evidence found in the cave along with the remains.

In other news, Intel has announced plans to cease production of its Pentium-4 line sometime this year in favour of the dual-core Pentium D and Pentium Extreme CPUs yet to be released (uhh.. guys? 'Pentium' comes from 'penta', meaning 'five'. How about picking a new name for that line of processor cores?) For the uninitiated, this means that their forthcoming lines of processors will actually have two processors in each module running in parallel - significant computing power on a single chip. They're hoping that these processor cores will hit the desktop, laptop, and high-performance server markets like nobody's business.

A few days ago I wrote about the judge and one of the lawyers who were supposed to be involved in the tribunal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq being assassinated in a drive-by shooting. One of my readers wrote to me later that day to inform me that Ra'id Juhi really wasn't involved in the tribunal, early news reports gave the wrong name of the judge involved in the shooting. The identities of the judges involved remain (as far as I know) a secret to prevent just this sort of thing from happening; that's blown to hell because the name of one of the judges hit the newswires as a result, so now everyone and their backup knows who to go for first.

I feel bad about this; I feel partially responsible because I mentioned the story. I figured that naming the dead doesn't hurt much because, well, they're dead, and not much else can happen to them, but if they're not really dead...

Is it possible to crack down on political blogging in the United States? If this bill passes, it might become illegal to link to the websites of political campaigns in ways that they don't want you to; it also might become illegal to forward public information, such as press releases, to mailing lists. Doing so could run you a hefty fine in that event. The Federal Elections Commission is retrofitting laws already in place that govern US campaign finance law to encompass the Net at this time. In the fall of 2004, US district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly overturned a decision of the FEC that exempted net.activity from these laws. The debate is over whether or not linking to politically-related sites constitutes a contribution, which would allow it to fall under the control of those laws if it does. This really makes a difference if the person doing the linking has contributed their legal limit to the campaign. It's essentially asking what the value of a hyperlink is, monetarily speaking. The reason the debate is so strong is because right now the Net falls under the same exemption that print journalists have (writing articles about political campaigns isn't considered political contribution at this time).

As some of you may know, I've been working with Speakeasy to set up migration to new DSL service; for only ten dollars more every month, I'm getting quadruple the bandwidth that I did from Telerama, the ISP I'd been with since.. let me see.. 1995?

The thing is, 384/128k service was killing me, especially because I host a number of websites on the Network, and they pull a fair amount of traffic (oh, and here's a shout to the folks who hate cosplayers and link to my site to make fun of me - thanks for all the new readers, guys!), and it was time to move on to a service that could provide me with the bandwidth I need without going bankrupt. Speakeasy's neat in that they don't care what you do with your bandwidth as long as you don't cause trouble for anyone.

Late last night I set about altering config files all over the Network in preparation for the switchover sometime today. I'd altered my DNS records and reconfigured the firewall's interfaces and filtering rules for the new IP addresses and routing information, so all I had to do was switch some files around and restart a half-dozen services, and all would be well.

By the time I'd gotten out of the shower the blinkylights on Lain, my firewall, had gone out. Out of curiosity I set a packet monitor on the external interface of Lain and saw DNS traffic passing by, which meant that my link was active, but the addresses were not those of Telerama's servers, so I set about flipping switches and restarting DNS, and lo and behold I'm back.

The tricky part was changing my domain registration records. I go through Network Solutions (no link because I don't feel like their dropping my domain because they ego-searched themselves and saw these comments) for my domain registration; their service is decent, their prices pretty high, and their web interface for domain management the utter pits. The pages that actually let you alter the configuration of your domain are not right up front, but hidden behind four or five pages in the Customer Service section. If you follow their instructions, you'll start thinking that you've lost your mind because the links they point you to don't exist on that page. A simple operation (changing the IP addresses of the primary and secondary DNSes) took over an hour, most of which was spent trying to make heads and/or tails out of the maze of links.

It'll take a few days for the records to propagate, but everything seems to be up and running once more.

More sabres are rattling on the international front as North Korea says that it will resume testing of its long-range missles, following an announcement on 10 February 2005 that they do indeed have nuclear capability. They've also announced that they are pulling out of the six-way disarmament talks, which include the US, China, Russia, Japan, and South Korea. As if that weren't enough, North Korea is also angry that they've been accused of being part of the Axis of Evil(tm), and are demanding an apology from George W. Bush.

Microsoft has managed to get a retrial for a court case that would have cost them $521mus in fines for patent infringement. Eolas Technologies and the University of California sued Microsoft last year for infringing a number of patents having to do with implementing web browser plugins. The courts threatened to not only fine the software giant but force them to re-work certain parts of the Internet Explorer web browser, as well as a number of other web browsers, but MS appealed to a higher court, citing and presenting prior art, in the form of a prototype web browser designed by a University of California student called Viola one year before the patent was issued. As a result, the patent is being reviewed by the USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office). Oddly enough, MS can patent stuff like basic functions of a CPU like "if not..then" and they don't even bat an eyelash.

In response to the broadcast flag legislation that will go into operation on 1 July 2005 (which mandates that all digital broadcast content must have a provision for a bit in the headers that says whether or not said content may be recorded or copied after recording; also, all devices capable of recieving such content must support this functionality; I've also just found out that the law prevents such devices from being (easily) user-modifiable, in the hope of keeping end-users from disabling the broadcast flag functionality of their TVs, video recorders, and other devices), a number of protestors got together at the Mission district offices of the EFF and held a television build-in, in which people constructed their own personal video recorders out of video input cards that ignore the broadcast flag (available until 1 July 2005 - check out PCHDTV.com for more information) and personal computers running Linux. The EFF has put up a homebrew PVR cookbook page, and you can also check out the homepage of MythTVfor the software they used to capture and view television content.

If that's not enough to make your head spin, check this out: The US military is funding research into devices that can cause acute physical pain at a distance of up to two kilometres in human beings. Medical doctors, psychologists, and ethicists are wondering if this is a legitimate endeavour. Another class of nonlethal weapon called pulsed energy projectiles, is based upon using bursts of plasma (superheated gas) to throw people around without actually harming them (think of Jake's pistol in the TekWar novels). The pain-generating weapons are based upon the same principle, only they cause pain receptors in the body to misfire instead of imparting kinetic energy upon them.

Rather than take care of a teacher who debatably went too far with a student, the school board of Brick Township in New Jersey is trying to restrict wireless recording devices in its schools. The situation went like this: A number of students refused to stand for the United States' National Anthem (which is well within ther rights); the teacher in the classroom went off on them, and then yanked the chair out from under one of them. A student with a cameraphone recorded a video of the incident and uploaded it to the Net. This student was suspended from school, incidentally. "Appropriate administrative action" was taken, representatives of the school board said, which basically means that nothing's going to happen to the teacher, the student who was dumped on the floor is going to find the rest of his time in that school a living hell, and the student who recorded the whole thing is in deep shit.

Total cost to dig up documents pertaining to the activities of a number of high-ups in the Social Security Administration: $203,436.75us. So much for the Freedom of Information Act.

I've set up an experimental search engine for my site. It needs a lot of work (it ignores the day-breaks in my memory logs, for example) but it's a start. Give it a shot and check it out.

Wouldn't you know it, the day I migrate to a new DSL provider, the sector of service that covers Pittsburgh got knocked out for a couple of hours. DSL, like fate, it not without a sense of irony, it seems.

This evening after dinner I decided to try to get some work in on my Tenjou Utena costume for Tekkoshocon. Dataline, also feeling the urge to be crafty, bought a sewing machine last night (which completely caught me by surprise; I'd been fighting with Lupa's for days and was about to give up and start playing around with the portable battery-powered sewing machine (which is going to Tekkoshocon with me, just in case) I'd also borrowed from Dataline) when she called me at work and told me that she'd gotten a good deal on a brand-new Kenmore portable sewing machine at Sears, and if I drove down to pick it up I could use it to finish my costume.

After dinner I darted out of the door and headed for the homefront to pick up the receipt and Sears card, then hit the pickup dock at the mall. The first thing I did after I got home was sit down and read the manual cover to cover twice, just to be sure that I knew what was what.

That might cost me geek points, but I'd rather know the rules before I start breaking them. I just need structure that way.

Anyway, once I'd learned what I could I set about practicing with some extra swatches of fabric, re-teaching myself how to use a sewing machine, run the thread, pin fabric, the whole nine yards (I'd learned back in junior high how to use a sewing machine, which was nearly fifteen years ago). Once I'd gotten comfortable with it, I put it away and read over the instructions for the fabric pattern one more time.

Tonight I actually set about putting the uniform together. I had to stop at Jo-Ann Fabric again to get more fusible interfacing (I didn't have enough for both lapels and the collar) and then figured out how to use it. The problem was that the travel iron I brought with me just wasn't cranking out enough heat to get the job done; I also wondered if I really was supposed to steam press the interfacing onto the fabric. A quick trip back to the homestead to borrow the clothes iron and consult dataline (yes, you do steam it on), and I was back home pressing and trying not to melt the heads of the pins. Everything turned out decently well, if I do say so myself. I also got some sewing on the machine in, in particular figuring out how to sew darts (inward-facing pleats in clothing to give it a three-dimensional shape), attaching the front of the jacket to the back, and the tops of the lapels to the collar. Unfortunately, at some point I broke the needle but didn't realise it, and it seems to have done a number on the fabric near the seam of the left shoulder. I don't know how it'll hold, so I'm taking extra precautions later on (in the form of a fabric reinforcement on the inside that bridges the mangled fabric and will hopefully prevent it from tearing itself apart) after I finish the seams. I think I can hide the stitches for the reinforcement under the blue parts of the jacket; time will tell.

If all goes according to plan, I should be done in another eight hours or so, counting pressing and finishing the seams. The blue trim's going to take some skull-sweat but I think I can do it by working from the patterns I've already got. It might be best to hand-sew them in place, though.

You Are 64% Femme and 36% Butch!

80 - 100% Femme - You're the girly girl of the century. Or Clay Aiken. 60 - 79% Femme - Girl? Almost certainly. If not, you've got some major man boobs going on. 40 - 59% Femme - Girl or guy? Even your best friends can't figure this one out. 20 - 39% Femme - You are likely male, or the toughest, scariest lesbian around. 0 - 19% Femme - You are 100% male. You make cowboys look like pussies.

How Butch or Femme Are You? More Great Quizzes from Quiz Diva

Usually it's the arrested who get the firing squad: One of the judges and a lawyer who would have been part of the tribunal that was to try Saddam Hussein were gunned down in a drive-by yesterday. News reports are saying that there isn't a hard connection between the shootings and the poisitions of the two men but.. bullshit. If proponents of the old regeime will threaten people with automatic weapons to keep them from voting, they'll sure as hell be inclined to shoot a few of the folks who will be trying their old boss. Keep an eye on the news coming out of Iraq and see if any other killings match up with the tribunal's personnel.

Bill Gates has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Because he isn't a British citizen, he can't call himself 'Sir', but he does now have the right to use the initials 'KBE' (Knight-commander of the British Empire) after his name. Gates was knighted for his charity work as well as his contributions to enterprise in Britain.

I called the loan company yesterday morning and faxed in the documents they asked for so as to fix the screwup back in January that resulted in their getting four times as much money as I'd authorised. I called this morning and they had recieved the faxes (I got the number right - yay) and were working on it. Now the only thing I can do is just sit back and wait.

On 21 February I made reference to an article about journalists being targeted in Iraq by military forces. Another article's appeared on the topic, and it's got POV stuff from the hotel that was shelled by a US M1A1 Abrams tank on the morning of 8 April 2003. The official report was that they were mistaken for an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) unit, and acted accordingly. Even though it was ostensibly a mistake, most the records of the investigation are still kept secret. Those that can be gotten are heavily redacted. What can be discerned is that the investigation is a limited Commander's Inquiry, which consists of interviews of involved personnel and some personnel who are familiar with the individuals in question. The surviving journalists weren't even mentioned.

You can also contact Dodd Dixon, the mayor of Winchester, KY, which is the town William Poole lives in by writing to him here: Dodd Dixon, Mayor, City Hall, 32 Wall Street, Winchester, KY 40391. Mayor Dixon's telephone number is 1-859-744-9815, his fax line's number is 1-859-745-4590, and his e-mail address is ddixon (at) winchestersky (dot) (delete this) com.

I was going through my bills and reconciling my bank book with receipts and payment statements, when I noticed an anomaly: My student loan bill was $0.00us. It's normally around $150us. I headed to the website of my loan company to see what they had on file for me when I noticed that they'd receieved a payment in the amount of $800us for the month of February. I added up the numbers for my checking account, and discovered that I was $600us off.. which means that the cheques I'd written for my apartment's utilities might not be covered.

My next stop was the website of my bank, where they put high-resolution scans of each cheque you write up for each customer's account. Yep, I'd written out "two hundred dollars and 0/100" for the cheque they'd last cashed. The numerical value, however, read $800.00.

On the back of my student loan statement was an 800 number for their main office. After getting stuck in voice-mail menus for a half-hour I was informed that the office was closed and then disconnected. Thanks, guys.

Back to the bank website, where I printed out two copies of my cancelled cheque (front and back, complete with routing information for the loan company). This morning I navigated the voice menus once more and got to a human being. I have to fax them a copy of my cancelled cheque (no problem) and my bank statement that says that the wrong amount was deducted (again, no problem). I'm going to try to do that from work today.

From the frying pan to the fire: Human rights abuses continued under the interim Iraqi government after Saddam Hussein was deposed. According to the US State Department, illegal detentions, torture, and forced confessions were still the norm after Hussein was forced from office and captured by US forces. The government is still corrupt at all levels of power over there, the report also states. There were no jury trials; only hearings and punishments meted out with the precision of a Swiss watch.

Answer this honestly: Did you really think anything was going to change over there because Hussein was thrown out? Really?

Some engineers at the University of Pennsylvania are working on theories of practical invisibility that do not appear to violate any known laws of physics. Instead of using the chameleon principle (make a covering 'aware' of what's behind it (for some value of 'behind') and have it project as clear an image of it as possible) they're trying to figure out how to minimise the amount of light scattered or reflected from objects by generating something called a plasmon field (yeah, it sounds like something from Star Trek - it's when you get the valence electrons of the atoms of the surface of an object moving to a particular rhythm, and if that rhythm is close to the wavelengths and frequencies of the light you're trying to not reflect, the object won't reflect and so will be pretty close to invisible). Trying to generate such a field aside (I've no idea how you'd even begin to do such a thing), there are so many frequencies of visible light that it might not even be possible to screen all of them out. The amount of energy required to generate such a field is also something that they're not talking about; it may not even be practical. There is also no way of knowing if it would even be safe for the object or any people close to the field.

Anyone who's ever had the misfortune of using CPUs manufactured by Cyrix are no doubt aware of how much heat they generate - enough to burn if you're not careful. Someone's figured out how to get some use out of them (aside from as a space heater) and made a hotplate using Cyrix cores.

I find it interesting that an article on the state of the US public school system appeared only in an Asian newswire. The governors of the fifty United States are uniformly concerned at how poorly students are doing in public high schools, and no answers are forthcoming. The kids just can't do the work; more to the point, many of them don't want to, and are expending far more energy to dodge the work than they'd be spending to do so. The number of students who drop out of high school or fail out of college early is scarily high. Twelve states, at this time, are hatching plans to better groom students for college and get them there. I hate to say it, but Pennsylvania tried that in 1992-1994 with something they called Project Rigor, and it failed miserably. My district's graduation rate among the test population (the class of 1996) fell markedly.

The article goes on: For every one hundred freshmen in high school, only 68 graduate from high school on time (the article does not state how many fail or drop out) and only 18 of those graduate from college 'on time' (probably defined as four years; five-year programmes notwithstanding). Bill Gates actually had a point when he said that high schools don't teach kids what they need to know. They don't. I might be coming from a biased perspective but we didn't actually learn any history until the last year of high school; many classes were simply repeats of one another (thank you, standardised curricula); specialised vocation training was limited to vo-tech schooling (which meant that you weren't going to college; going vo-tech disqualified you from the college preparation classes); I could rant for hours about burned-out teachers but I really don't feel like airing that particular dirty laundry in this forum. Incidentally, I'd love to find out how many school districts make you pay for taking the AP (Advanced Placement) tests, but that's neither here nor there.

I don't actually have much to say on this topic that isn't a flat-out rant. I came from the public school system and was fucked over pretty thoroughly by it. The only things I really learned from it was how to be sneaky, Novell Netware (which is worth sweet frag all these days), emergency first aid, and how to manipulate bureaucracy to my advantage. Oh, and the Bill of Rights; thank you, my scary-as-hell civics teacher who could and did rant for hours on end about civil rights and liberties and the Constitution (you know the type; the wild-eyed Constitutionalist guy at the end of your block you collects guns, bitches about being in Korea and Vietnam (note I didn't say 'talks about'), and can make you stop and think very, very hard with a single sentence).

The plight of John Gilmore, who only wants to see the law that requires him to show ID to get on an airplane has made it to the mainstream press, in particular the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. On 4 July 2002, Gilmore went to the Oakland Airport in California to board a plane, and was asked by a clerk to present photo identification before he'd be allowed to get on board. He refused (you don't actually have to identify yourself if you're told to) and was told that it was the law. When he asked which law was relevant to the situation, he was told that it was sensitive security information, and they were not allowed to show him. Since when are we not allowed to know the laws that apply to life in the US? To date, no one has been able to show him this law; not lawyers, not judges, not legal scholars, not the government, no one.

Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barbara Boxer, together with Representative Stephanie Tubbs have proposed a new bill, called the Count Every Vote Act of 2005 (what is it with all of these dorky names?) which mandates all electronic voting machines used in the United States will produce a verified paper receipt for every vote cast on them as well as voting access for every US citizen all across the board (something the last two elections have become famous for not having). The CEV Act would also have Election Day declared a federal holiday, which would theoretically mean that so many people would have the day off that they could go to the polls and vote; whether or not this would be enforced is anyone's guess. On top of that, people could register to vote on Election Day at the polls (this seems like a bad idea to me; as they say in Chicago, "Vote early and often.. even after you're dead.") and no-excuse absentee voting would be implemented (remember the many thousands of absentee votes that were thrown away by counters at the polls in the south in 2004?) The bill would also prevent state election officers and the owners and managers of voting hardware companies from taking part in certain politically-related activities.

Start writing to your senators and representatives and bend their ears to getthem to vote for this one.

It is steadily becoming less and less safe to write anything, especially overseas right now. A weblogger in Iran was sentenced to 14 years in prison because they said he was spying and aiding in revolutionary activities. Arash Sigarchi made the mistake of writing about the arrest and imprisonment of other webloggers in Iran not too long ago, and he caught the attention of the current Iranian regeime. Iran has gone so far as to limit net.access to many weblogging sites, including livejournal.com and blogger.com. Sigarchi is being used as an example to others who would criticise Iran, it appears.

My offer to host weblogs for people in weblog-unfriendly locations such as Iran and China still stands. I don't ask questions.

Keeping a diary, it seems, is a dangerous thing. An unnamed junior at the George Rogers Clark High School was arrested last Tuesday when his grandparents found a journal he'd been keeping for English class, in which he was outlining short stories, and turned it in to police, who then arrested him for making terroristic threats. Interestingly, the police completely ignored the fact that he was working on a story about an invasion of zombies. Does this mean that George Romero and Sam Raimi were threatening the United States of America (maybe I shouldn't give Them any ideas...) Two days after being arrested, the judge raised the bond to $5kus after the prosecutor asked for it.

Well-read readers of mine will no doubt remember the following passage from the second chapter of 1984: "Only the Thought Police would read what he had written, before they wiped it out of existence and out of memory. How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?"

This is a very, very frightening thing that has happened. They freaked out over a fictional piece written for a class and had a high school student arrested. What is next? Who is next?

Perhaps a little read up on artificial languages will slow them down a little. They can't bust you for what they can't read, can they?

Due to the snow yesterday, many of us left work early, around 1600 EST, so as to get home before the roads got too bad. Not a bad idea.

The better part of ninety minutes later, I finally returned to the garden. After losing control of my car while trying to get up the hill (no harm, no foul) and creeping down the highway, my nerves were resonating like a pair of headphones within a ten mile radius of a KDKA broadcast tower. But all is well. I could have done without the doors of my car freezing shut last night, and scraping the windows down so I could see was just annoying.

Canada's feeling the lean from the US because they refused to sign on to the ballistic missile defense programme the US is trying to start back up. Potentially trade agreements might suffer because the US is being snubbed by the 800 pound gorilla (better snubbed than picked up and rent limb from limb). Paul Cellucci, the US ambassador to Canada, has manigimously stated that the US will defend Canada anyway, if push came to shove. You can check out the US' side of things here, at the Ballistic Missile Defense programme's website. For some reason, though, the old adage "Those who do not remember history will be condemned to repeat it" springs immediately to the forefront of my mind. Why? The latest tests of the system have been less than successful. There is a great deal of pressure on the contractors and the military to deploy the Star Wars system even though it hasn't been adequately tested or even debugged. The deployment schedule is hopelessly aggressive, which isn't giving anyone enough time to do the job to government specifications, let alone do the job well. The General Accounting Office (GAO in the linked reports) has been telling the organising team that it just isn't going to work, but they're not listening. Just like in the 1980's when Ronald Reagan was pushing for the same programme, with considerably less success than the last few tests.

To be fair, the project's had some success, but not nearly enough to bet the farm (or the US) on it. The cost overruns alone are horrendous.

I don't want to say that the jury for the latest Michael Jackson child molestation trial's been stacked or anything but this is suspicious, no matter what. One of the jurors (and two of the alternates) have visited the Neverland Ranch; one of the backups' mother-in-laws used to work as Jackson's housekeeper. I was under the impression that such ties to the defendant would disqualify one for serving on a jury in the United States...

Yes, I'm still stalking the Jeff Gannon case. Someone's compiled a movie of media coverage on this and put the file up here.

If you've been watching the Choicepoint's been owned saga, you're aware of the fact that the identifying information of several thousand people was stolen, identifying information that would make identity theft trivially easy for whomever was behind it. In response, the United States Senate has assembled a subcommittee and will be holding hearings on the topic of identity protection and theft in the near future. The question on the table is whether or not regulation of information brokering companies like Choicepoint is necessary (no shit, Skolnick); Senator Arlen Spector has agreed but nothing's been planned and scheduled yet (surprise, surprise). The numbers have increased since the breach of security was announced, incidentally; Choicepoint is saying that over 140k files have been illegally copied (the word 'dossier' doesn't seem like it would work though the dictionary definition is accurate) while the state government of California is estimating around half a million. As if that weren't enough, some of the identities of the people have already been stolen; people using one woman's background have been arrested in a number of states recently for charges ranging from prostitution to manslaughter.

Not only is Big Brother watching, but Big Brother can't seem to keep His siblings and in-laws out of His databases. I haven't decided which is worse.

On the ridiculous front, we've got speculation on the tsunami in December that makes me wonder what they're putting in the water supply. Geologists have built detailed virtual models of the geological and tectonic stresses, structures, and factors extant in the region and used the data gathered thus far to model what happened on the ocean floor... but I'm just not buying that subterranean neutron bombs were detonated to cause the tsunami.

Occam's Razor: When reasoning, don't make any more assumptions than you have to. Nuclear weapons buried in the fault lines are a hell of a stretch, especially without any hard evidence, or even soft evidence gathered along the way.

Last evening was spent helping Lupa and some friends move. She'd been having serious problems in her apartment building with an upstairs neighbor (I don't want to say that he threw loud parties, but I've heard some of his shindigs from the street while driving home) and her landlady offered her another apartment in a much more quiet part of town. So, to that end, Hasufin and I set about packing up Lupa's stuff, loading it into a number of trucks, and driving it across town to the new building. Moving the bed and box spring wound up being the most difficult part of the operation, followed by the dresser and its contents (some of which wound up on the street when an unsecured drawer flew out of the truck). Thankfully, the rest of the move went uneventfully, and nothing else was damaged. The dresser's going to have to be refinished but that was planned anyway.

Moving the animal parts was the most fun of all. Lupa has an extensive collection of animal parts, from pelts and skins to skulls and even a few mounted heads which she uses in her work and her art. A small group of neighborhood kids was practicing the art of the young (indolence) in the lobby of the building, and with each trip their eyes got bigger and bigger as they watched what we were carrying out to the trucks: A mounted deer's head with a nine-point rack; a mounted boar's head, mouth agape; a deer head and pelt; several crates of animal skulls (only Lupa knows exactly what she has)...

This morning, I awoke to a leaden sky and fine white flakes sifting down to coat the ground and everything else with a puffy layer of snow. After rubbing my eyes a few times and trying to reboot the rest of my cerebral cortex, I realised that it was indeed snowing, and that I'd have to find clothes appropriate for Pittsburgh at this time of year; I'd also need to marshall up my patience, because it is assured that at least one of the main roads between my Garden and the office would not be plowed, salted, or even driven upon since the snow started to fall. As it turned out, it was the side streets that I park on every morning that weren't cleared. I missed my usual turnoff by sliding down the hill past the intersection when my car skidded on the fresh snow.

Thankfully it's a one-way street, pointing downhill, so nothing bad came of it save having to circle around, slide again on an uncleared street, and give it another shot.

System and network administrators are no doubt familiar with the singular hell that is trying to get workstations (and the odd server... which should be a hanging offense) infected with spyware working properly once more. Home users who have ever had a 2.5 GHz machine running like an 80486 due to multiple spyware infestations (and usually a worm or two) are nodding their heads sadly at this time. One of the worst varieties is the world-famous Gator, written and released by the Claria Corporation.

Maybe he'll infect the terrorists' machines with Gator and keep them from doing much more than rebooting their laptops.

Going out of your way to purchase bottled water because it's supposed to be better for you is probably more a miss than a hit, especially when it comes to the stuff dissolved in the water that you don't know about.. take for example Dasani, which comes in the nifty blue-coloured plastic bottles. The Coca-Cola Company was taking water straight out of its main water supply, running it through a standard reverse-osmosis filter (which you might have installed under your kitchen sink), and dissolving various bromide compounds in it, followed by an infusion of ozone gas to alter the flavour slightly.

Amir Laty, Israeli diplomat sent to Australia, was kicked out after being caught trying to seduce high-level personnel, including diplomats, intelligence operatives (read, 'spies'), defense officers, and even a few Australian journallists. Why? His nineteen year history as an officer of Israeli intelligence. Everyone he was going for had access to classified information, or could give him access to same. Australian laws state that any government agents that have contact with foreign officials of any kind (including diplomats) must keep their superiors informed as to who it is and what's going on to prevent compromise of confidentiality. The Israeli diplomatic core and the Mossad are not saying anything to anyone about this, and are keeping Laty under wraps at this time.

Could this be happening in the United States? I wouldn't doubt it. It's entirely possible that at least one high-up at the Pentagon has been compromised by the Mossad, though. The name of the person hasn't been released because the investigation is in progress at this time, but he/she's been described as a desk officer of the Near East and South Asia Bureau, one of the six major regional departments of the Pentagon. Arrests, possibly for charges of espionage, are expected as early as next Monday.

Readers who keep in touch with the computer security community have probably heard about Someone Out There scanning for systems running SSH and trying to brute-force passwords. The attempts come in bursts from all over the Net, without any rhyme or reason. There are at least two tools used to do this, and probably more (SSH Scanner and Scan SSH). I discovered today that Nessus has at least one plugin that does the same thing when I was going through the logfiles on my workstation and found a boatload of SSH login attempts that fit the profile of the SSH scans. Not that this means much, mind you, only that folks out there who have been working on this for a while now know that there's another tool in use. The savvy are already aware of this; I hope I've saved some folks a message to a mailing list.

The usernames run by the scan are 4dgifts, jill, system, db2fenc1, db2as, root, date, guest, friday, db2inst1, backdoor, n3ssus, nonexistent36696808, bin, ro, rwa, ezsetup, glftpd, stoogr, demos, swift, hax0r, gamez, rewt, toor, wank, bash, jack, tutor, and outofbox.

Driving home from work yesterday, I was rudely reminded of a Pittsburgh truth: No matter where you are, no matter how fast you're going, someone will cross a busy street against the light just as you begin to turn and have the nerve to flag you off because you nearly ran them down.

Let me let you in on a little secret, pedestrians. It's well kept in other cities, but hasn't made it to the Steel City yet. When the "don't cross" sign is lit and/or you've got a red light from the direction you're trying to cross, DON'T CROSS THE BLOODY STREET. Motor vehicles have the right of way at that time, and they might not be able to jam on the brakes to keep from turning you into a heap of broken bones and mangled flesh. I was able to stop yesterday; the next guy might not be.. or just might not care and keep going on principle.

The court of appeals stated yesterday that the FCC had gone too far when it began writing legislation that makes it difficult to copy digital television broadcasts. Judge Harry Edwards said that "Selling televisions is not what the FCC is in the business of" on the topic of the FCC mandating that all manufacturers of television equipment must include circuitry that watches for the presence of a "don't copy" flag in the digital stream and prevents the recording or copying of recordings in their products. This circuitry must be present in all products by 1 July 2005. All of this bruhaha is meant to curb the trading of digital recordings of television programmes on the Net, which is a particular problem because the commercials are often edited out of the recordings, meaning less advertising revenue, nevermind the fact that these recordings introduce people to shows that might not otherwise get to see them, and often buy DVDs later as a result. Buffy and Charmed have dedicated fan followings for this reason.

For decades, people have been searching for the perfect hangover cure: A way to drink all you like without having to suffer for it the next day. With that in mind, I find it a little odd that a company called Spirit Sciences has developed RU-21 Red, a drug that keeps you drunk for longer. These guys are apparently ex-pharmacopiaests for what used to be the KGB, and did a lot of biochemical work for them during the cold war; their claim to fame is the neigh-mythical compound RU-21, which is supposed to knock a hangover out like a young Muhammed Ali on a bad day. RU-21 Red contains compounds which slow the metabolic breakdown of ethanol in the human body, so you need less alcohol to stay ferschickered longer.

Have you ever gotten the feeling that you'd pissed someone important off? You know what I mean.. people stop talking to you.. you can't go places anymore.. sources dry up... after a short period of time, it becomes obvious to you. Case in point: Robert Ehrlich, Governor of Maryland, filed an edict in November of 2004 that states that no state officials are permitted to speak to a small number of reporters from the Baltimore Sun, namely David Nitkin and Michael Olesker. A lawsuit has been filed on their behalf because it discourages anyone who disagrees with the governor from saying anything for fear of repercussions from on high or losing access to what is legally defined as public information. The Baltimore Sun has published several articles that were critical of Ehrlich, and he's not happy about it at all.

And a lot more people are going to be unhappy with life shortly if this is accurate: Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector and author has stated that George W. Bush has signed documents ordering preparations for the bombing of Iran in June of 2005. He's also gone on the record as stating that the US was manipulating the elections in Iraq a few weeks ago. Iran's nuclear capability, be it for generating electricity or weapons grade uranium isotopes is considered a threat by the US government, and it's going to have to go. Whispers inside DC state that They (for some value of 'They') are hoping it'll lead to a change of regeime in Iran. This has been published by one Dahr Jamail, one of the few independent journalists in Iraq until recently; Jamail's articles may be read here.

Yiqun Lisa Chin has posted a three-page summary of the SHA-1 algorithm compromise to her site (it's the link at the very bottom of the page). No word yet on the full paper.

In case you're wondering why this furor about some cryptographic algorithm is such a big deal, check out the example in this post to Bugtraq and put yourself in the position of the defendent.

Microsoft's playing the patent game again - this time they're trying to patent a single operator in BASIC-like languages, called "IsNot". The operator, in a nutshell, performs a test to ensure that one value is not equal to another (as the name implies). RealSoftware, Incorporated and a number of other companies that maintain BASIC-like development environments fear that this patent could siphon millions of dollars out of their coffers in licensing fees. This particular test isn't native to BASIC only, it is, in fact a common operation in just about every programming language, from the machine language of every CPU on the planet to C, Perl, and Java. This could also prevent BASIC-like code from being ported to other platforms.

I'll leave the wise-ass remarks about BASIC not being the best language to program anything in (or even learn to program in) for the experts.

Remember the days of PCs when some manufacturers would rig up the most innocuous components, such as memory modules or hard drives, so that only the parts you bought from them would work, and the rest of the market be damned? Compaq/HP is doing it with their laptops. Trying to plug a third-party microPCI wireless adaptor into an nx9110 laptop failed becasuet the PCI ID of the card isn't listed as valid in the BIOS' internal table of 'approved components', and thus refuses to boot up. If the original goes, either you hope to buy a replacement someplace (stuff like this has a habit of going out of manufacture) or you're basically screwed. Thankfully, someone's already figured out how to hack the BIOS image to work around this. One Paul Sladen has already put together a list to help this effort.

Yeah, you can find all of this off of that one blog article, but I'm doing my part to try to push it toward the top of Google results.

It appears that XP Service Pack 2's firewalling capability has a hole that you can drive a truck through, in the form of a single registry key that implements its exception list (software that it doesn't try to restrict network-wise). Due to the default permissions on that registry key, any software can add itself to that key and not be blocked if it's designed to write to it.. like some spyware, it appears. Just one more thing to worry about, it appears.

This makes me want to set up an XP SP2 machine and write a local policy entry that'll lock it down.. then I could export it as a file that can be applied by anyone. I wonder if I have a copy anyplace...

Remember hearing about that weird plane that no one seems to know anything about, yet has been seen making its rounds from country to country? The one owned by a company that's owned by someone who doesn't seem to exist? MSNBC's got the goods on it.. One Khaled el_Masri was nabbed on New Year's Eve of 2003, handcuffed, and driven to a hotel. Three weeks later, he was flown on that jet to a facility in Afghanistan, where he was interrogated for months about the mosque he attended in his home country of Germany, then let go on a road just outside of the country of Macedonia. The news magazine Newsweek has gotten its collective hands on the flight plans of this phantom Boeing 737 - it shuttles detainees from interrogation facility to interrogation facility secretly. CIA representatives are, predictably, saying nothing. The amount of accountability that the Agency has to the people whose tax dollars fund its operations? Zero. The amount of accountability that the Agency has to the rest of the government? Epsilon.

Terrorism is a threat, yes, but using it to describe each and every natural event that can adversely affect human life is sensationalistic. The avian flu outbreak in the far side of the Pacific Rim is killing dozens of people and is hypothesised to have the potential of killing millions if it were to spread effectively. It appears to be a much stronger strain of the flu, as well, because it's ripping through populations of animals that were thought immune to the avian flu like a buzzsaw, and humans are beginning to fall under its onslaught as well. One Dr. Robert Webster of Saint Jude's Research Hospital in Memphis, TN, however, was quoted as saying that "This virus is playing its role as a natural bioterrorist."

Nature is nature... it does what it does because it tries to maintain a balance in the environment. Nature is made up of a multitude of cycles that are all interconnected, cycles which both support and check one another. Viruses that are inimical to life are part of those cycles because they not only cull the population but they also force lifeforms to develop stronger immune systems, traits which are passed down to later and later generations of lifeforms. The avian flu isn't a bioterrorist... come on... it's doing its job. It sucks, yes. It can kill people, yes. But it's been doing that for centuries. Before the avian flu, there have been other viruses and bacteria that have done the exact same thing.

This is one of the slickest decks I've seen in a long time. It's up on eBay Deutschland right now, and it's little more than a framework for the components that usually make up a computer made of wood with slots for the (exposed) parts and cable runs. You've got to see the images to make any sense of it (though the text is in German).

Attention fans of Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence who are angry about how badly Dreamworks botched the subtitling of the Region-1 DVD release: It is now possible to send your disc back and get a copy of the v4.0 DVD for no cost. They've set up a page where you can request a mailer here: http://recp.rm05.net/servlet/SignUpForm?f=2318. In about two weeks' time they'll send you a package; put only the DVD disc into the package and send it back to them. In about two weeks, they'll ship you a copy with the corrected subtitle track. Thanks to Seaweb and Mu DeKatt on the serial-experiments-lain mailing list for the heads-up.

In response to the reported compromise of the SHA-1 message digest algorithm a few days ago, the PGP Corporation has announced that it will be moving to more secure versions of this algorithm in their implementation of digital signatures in PGP. The company states that this migration will be easy because it designs all of its products so that new algorithms can be installed and old ones depricated due to their modular structure. Backwards compatibility will be retained for decryption and verification of existing encrypted messages and signatures.

One of the rumours that's been flying around is that certain journalists in Iraq are being targetted by military forces for elimination. Some of the information that's come out of Iraq supports this; the raid on the hotel where a number of BBC correspondents were staying, for example. Others say that it's a load of dreck and anti-war propaganda. One thing's for certain, though: It's happening. I can't say who's doing it or why, but there's an article at the Guardian that draws together all of the reports of journalists being kidnapped, attacked, killed, or merely disappearing from the face of the planet without a trace. Journalists from France, Italy, the United States, Great Britain, and Iraq are all on the list, as well as a few other countries. Very few people in the US are talking about it; most people don't believe the original reporter who tried to break the story in the US. I say that you should look at this article, and examine at least some of the other articles this one links to, and make up your own mind.

Only in San Francisco.. I wish I could have seen this. The widow of Emperor Joshua Norton the first, monarch of the United States of America and protector of Mexico (requisat en pace, your Highness) made her thirty-first pilgrimage to his grave yesterday to pay her respects with her followers, drawn from San Francisco's best, brightest, most flaming, and most eccentric.

I should be recuperating right now, but Genetik's just forwarded this to me: Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide at the age of 67. Thompson, who founded the 'gonzo' school of journalism in which the reported immerses him/her/itself in the topic of study instead of observing it from the sidelines, took his own life earlier tonight with a firearm. The famous author of such books as Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas and Hell's Angels is no more.

Mr. Thompson, you'll be missed. This world, such as it is, is now much less in your passing. We'll knock one back for you at each con we go to, especially the Soldier of Fortune tradeshow this year.

The rights to the Fullmetal Alchemist novels and art book have been purchased by Viz, and will be released starting in October of 2005.

For those of you still wondering about that survey of high school students who think that the Bill of Rights gives people too much freedom, you can check out the specifics of that survey here. The survey was taken of 100,000 high school students, 8,000 high school teachers, and 500 principals and school administrators sampled from 544 schools around the United States. The key findings of the study are available from this site, breaking down the numbers for the answers for each question by category (students, teachers, principals, and adults). You can also download the results as a .pdf file to store for later. I suggest you take a good, hard look at them.. and then have a long talk with your children about the principles upon which this country was founded and why they are important.

Microsoft's website has a l33tspeak primer for parents, so that they can keep better tabs on what their kids are up to.. I guess no one remembers the dozens of l33tspeak translators that used to make the rounds of the BBS scene. No surprise.

I also suppose that no one remembers when you could be flamed off of a BBS for using l33tspeak because it meant that you were clueless but trying to pass yourself off as an 'elite computer hacker'.

Last night wound up being almost like a night from a late-night 1980's computer hacker movie in how it unfolded. I drove to the South Side to get together with some friends at the Beehive and somehow wound up there fully an hour early, which is a change of circumstance for me. Clad in a duster that's seen better geological eras and a hoodie, curled up in the back drinking coffee that you could power a racecar I spent the first part of the night reading Gibson and listening to the music playing over the Beehive's XM radio system - new wave and old-school goth. Where else could you hear Missing Persons back to back with Oingo Boingo?

People started arriving around 1920 EST last night, and after taking over the corner booth and finishing the caffeine, we hiked the two blocks to a diner to get dinner and warm up after the frigid night air. We were the only ones in the back (somehow) and had a good time with the waiter, who had an excellent sense of humour for the likes of us. The new folks sat against the wall and didn't say much, though I did try to keep lines of communication open with them.

Today, like yesterday, was one of those running around days, where you get a lot done and then run out of juice and stuff to take care of around the same time. I picked up my subscriptions from the comic shop (they'd been waiting there for me for a quarter-year, now) and a few things at the dollar store, then bought groceries for the week to come with the gift card I'd gotten for my birthday (thanks, mom).

The afternoon was spent messing around with the lock on my safe and downloading as much Fullmetal Alchemist manga as I could get my hands on before it all vanished due to Viz licensing it. Incidentally, I found the first FMA DVD at the comic store today. It's got four episodes on it (out of fifty-one) and was retailing there for about $25us. The DVD with the limited edition metal tin and the soundtrack was retailing for about $45us. I also found the time to throw five loads of laundry in and make dinner. The Iron Chef cooking sauces rock all known sheep, in particular the Orange Ginger sauce, which leaves the Garden smelling very nicely of, well, oranges and ginger.

I'm steadily coming to the conclusion that the ravages of Time are beginning to take a toll rivalling that of PennDOT's on my body, as rewired as it is. I can't keep going as long as I used to, anymore. When I was in high school I would think nothing of staying up until 0300 EST hacking on something or other and then getting up to go to school. Later, just staying up all night through college, going clubbing until 0230 EST, hanging out at Eat and Park afterward, and then going to work the next morning at 0800 EST with no ill effects. Now I can stay up until 0400 with great difficulty, and I sleep until noon the next day because my wetware demands REM sleep. I don't recall installing the garbage collector from Java v1.4 in my wetware...

What really gets to me is that travel wears me down the same way a beltsander wears down a styrofoam block. Going to HOPE every couple of years usually leaves me ill by the time I get back to Pittsburgh, usually with the flu or a summer cold that's pretending to be demonic posession. Same thing with Defcon. When I'm visiting Lyssa it might just be the hours we keep while I'm down there (diurnal.. mostly) or it might be the fact that I drive five hours each way, but it leaves me wiped out for the rest of the week no matter what. It's really starting to disturb me; I'm not really pushing myself at all, just driving around, and yet I feel like someone's been pummling me with a cinder block for days afterward. I don't understand why. I try to keep myself in decent shape. I don't just sit around and do nothing all day...

Lupa's moving again - the situation with her neighbors has gotten to the point where her landlady's let her transfer to another of her buildings without breaking her lease. I don't want to say they're loud or anything but I heard them once or twice while driving back to the Garden.. from the street. To that end, she dropped off one of her pets, Tatzelwurm, last night to keep him/her safe while everything else gets shaken up. It's strange having that much organic life in the Garden - the place feels a lot warmer than it is right now. During my morning rounds, I fed her a couple of mealworms that had been rolled in a calcium supplement. Their container had been sitting on the floor all night (closed, of course) so they'd probably gone dormant from the cold. When I picked them up and dropped them in, they weren't exactly what you would call active, but I think the heat lamp will fix that shortly. Or at least it should.

Qwest Communications, which has been in financial difficulty for some time, is making overtures to pick up telecom provider MCI in the near future, though they haven't been successful yet. They offered $8bus for acquisition, but MCI has opted to accept the offer of $6.75bus from Verizon Communications, which is in much better waters at this point in time, though the reason given is that there would be less hassle from the SEC.

Does anyone else remember back in 1984 when the SEC broke AT&T up into a bunch of smaller companies because they had a monopoly, which violates Federal laws (not that they're enforced or anything - look at the judgement against Microsoft and see how many of the terms have come to pass)? All of the Baby Bells are slowly coalescing once more like the T-1000 after that bath of liquid nitrogen.

I don't know what to make of that. I don't really remember life under Ma Bell - I just know that we had to rent our phones from them (and still had to up until last year for obscure reasons) and that we had to clear new equipment through their CO before we could plug it in (like my modems). Long distance service is something else entirely. It's a very compeditive field price-wise, and all of the corporations in it are sharking for the most customers and the best possible deal that keeps them in business and their coffers full. Local service is hit or miss; where I am, it's Verizon or nothing. I don't know what the situation is like elsewhere, though I'm kind of curious about it. I wonder how the long-distance market's going to react to all of the smaller companies coming back together. A lot of the Baby Bells are long-distance companies first and foremost (like MCI and Sprint).

Yet more evidence that global warming is not only real but is a threat has made it to the news. Since the NOAA has begun monitoring oceanic conditions, the average water temperature of the world (that's a lot of water - seven oceans and I don't know how many seas) has gone up a little over one and one-half degrees in the past 40 years. That's not much until you factor in the fact that the average was computed from many thousands of samples all over the world, each showing a little part of a lot of area. Any change that noticable in a system that large is a pretty major change, and will have repercussions all over the place, as dictated by systems theory. Moreover, the composition of the atmosphere is slowly changing; levels of carbon dioxide are increasing faster than the limited vegetation on the planet can cope. These calculations have been repeated independently, and the results have been the same each time. If the changing weather patterns aren't enough to drive the point home, for gods' sake do your own research and look at the numbers yourself.

For those of you who are screaming that it's only a theory, please stop using the definition of the world 'theory' that you picked up from prime-time television and check the dictionary. You know who you are.

For once, I wish that people would stop and read the error messages they get all the way through before asking for help. When an error window pops up, it just might have helpful information for both you and the technician you call for assistance. For example, it might have the useful suggestion to put the Office installation CD-ROM in the drive so it can pull .cab files it needs from the disk. Unless you tell me that, however, I won't know to get the disk from the library before running up three flights of steps. I know that the vast majority of Windows error boxes either mean that there's nothing you can do or that you are now screwed, but it's not a good idea to assume.

The United States Senate has voted to ban employers and health insurance companies from using genetic information to help decide if employment or coverage will be granted. Because the genetic markers that can suggest or cause many genetic disorders (recessive and dominant traits, respectively) can now be detected through DNA sequencing, there is much concern over whether or not people will be declared liabilities and turned down over something they have no control over - their genetic heritage. Federal law now states that you cannot be discriminated against on this basis, as well as your age, sex (I won't get into the sex/gender controversy at this time), race, and/or national origin. The bill called the Genetic Non-Discrimination Act, passed by a vote of 98 to 0. Way to go, folks: You actually did something right for a change.

Thirty kilogrammes of plutonium is missing from the Stellafield Nuclear Power Plant in England. Authorities are saying that the highly toxic nuclear material (plutonium is a potent metabolic poison in addition to being highly radioactive) was probably misplaced due to an accounting error. The plant further stated that the amount of material missing was well within the acceptible amount for a facility of that size. Still, that is far from reassurring. Have you ever wondered what the situation is like in the United States that you're not aware of?

Anthropologists have just confirmed that remains found in Ethiopia are far older than originally thought, clocking in at 195k years before the common era. These remains are the oldest known signs of the existence of homo sapients found and verified via radioargon dating techniques to date. The estimated locations on the timeline of the appearance and sophistication of human culture, however, have not really changed.

The new Napster's copy protection scheme used on their pay-for-download .mp3 files has been broken. Basically, someone figured out that if you install a plugin for Winamp called Output Stacker (which works like the Disk Writer plugin for XMMS), you can play such a file and Winamp will write the audio out to the hard disk in the form of a .wav file, which can then be edited and re-encoded as a normal .mp3 file. People have been doing this for years to record net.audio streams, such as Live365.com netcasts.

Nicholas Jacobson, who was picked up in November of 2004 for cracking the network of mobile provider T-Mobile plead guilty to one count of intentionally accessing a protected computer and causing reckless damage, which is basically a fancy way of saying that he violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. T-Mobile has alerted only 400 of its customers whose personal information was accessed. Evidence at the trial suggests that Jacobson had access to the network for at least a year, though he actually made use of the access sporadically. Jacobson is looking at a maximum sentence of five years in jail.

In a move that's more on the part of the company than good sense, the InCom Corporation, which developed the RFID tracking system for students in Sutter, California, has cancelled the programme without warning. Earnie Graham, superintendent of the school district, was quoted as saying that he was disappointed and that he felt he'd let his staff down. The programme was put into place without the notification or consent of the parents of the students, which resulted in a firestorm of protest in the school district.

It's better that this happened before the district discovered that the system wouldn't really fix anything. If one of the students were to be kidnapped from the complex, the sensors could track them only as far as the perimeter of the building; they wouldn't be any help in tracing them, and it would be trivial for a kidnapper to tear the tag off. Similiarly, they'd be no help with the truancy problem because it would be easy to give the tag to a friend to carry around the school. No tag, no tracking. It wouldn't fix the vandalism/graffiti problem because the amount of time necessary to go to the bathroom and the amount of time necessary for a tagger to whip out a marker and scrawl on something aren't too different. If these schools are anything like the ones I came from, the amount of time necessary to start a fire and the amount of time necessary to go to the bathroom aren't too different, either.

John Negroponte's appointment to the position of ambassador to Iraq leaves a bad taste in a lot of mouths when you factor in his human-rights track record. In the Honduras, where the United States was staging some of its Contra War ops in the 1980's, he permitted the kidnapping, torture, and execution of those he deemed 'subversives', all in violation of international law. Moreover, he denied that they were taking place when Congress was presented with evidence of what was happening; he also advised his subordinates to say nothing on the matters. He was also responsible for covering up some of the activities of the Honduran regeime of the time from official inquiry. Now he's the ambassador to Iraq, which as you know is a political powder keg at this point in time. His history makes me not want to trust him, to be frank.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - the United States is in a buttload of trouble. And I don't just mean not knowing the definition of the word 'theory', and not knowing how to distinguish it from a hypothesis (hey, I learned something tonight..). Biology teachers are afraid to teach evolution because they're afraid of controversy, or worse, being canned. Geology and physics are coming under fire, too. The Hubble Space Telescope has been cut off and will be allowed to deorbit under its own power, resulting in its destruction early next year. We really are heading for another dark age.

If anyone knows what's going on on route 28 south in Pittsburgh this morning, please drop me a line to tell me. I was stuck in traffic for the better part of two hours this morning, which is highly unusual for this part of the city. I think something happened down by the construction (or remains therof) but was not able to figure out what. After doubling back and taking an alternate (also clogged with traffic, probably from whatever happened on 28 south), I finally got to the office. Somehow, I managed to find parking. The whole time I was surfing the mid 100-MHz frequency band with one of my scanners but wasn't able to pick anything up. Maybe I'll finally get that buggywhip antenna for my car...

The Kyoto Accord, a world-wide treaty to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases and thus reduce impact upon the environment goes into effect today. The United States, of course, refused to sign. Thirty-five nations in the world plus the European Union agreed to cut their production and emission of six gases that have been documented to adversely affect the delicate balance of chemicals and temperatures throughout the ecosystem by five percent.

Normally journalists in the United States do not have to reveal their sources for news stories because repercussions to those sources are known to happen (some people just don't like making it into the news), and no one likes to have blood on their hands. However, it has been ruled that two journalists must reveal who gave them information about a leak within the CIA that compromised the identities of two undercover operatives. Rumour has it that the Bush regeime itself leaked the names of those operatives, and Judith Miller of the New York Times and Matthew Cooper of Time Magazine broke the story. The grand jury wants to know who told them about this, because it's a federal offense to blow the cover of an undercover agent. If they don't tell the grand jury how they found out, they could be put in jail for eighteen months for contempt of court.

The skies are full of things we don't expect to see, especially in Iran, it appears. Stories are flying over there about silver objects criscrossing the skies, and they could be US surveillance drones, like those that are used in Iraq to hunt for Al-Quaida operatives. The US has been making noises to the effect of making Iran their next target because they've got nuclear facilities over there, so they're understandably on the defensive.

If you haven't ridden in one of the hybrid cars yet, you're really missing out on a unique experience: Some friends of mine have hybrids, and in their cars I've gotten not only the smoothest ride ever (which is a hell of a lot to say if you've ever driven in Pennsylvania) but I've been amazed at the gas mileage: A trip from Pittsburgh to Washington, DC took about a half-tank of gas. Several such trips have had similiar results, so I'm not inclined to think it was a fluke. This is beginning to make folks higher up in the food chain worry, however: The state of California wants to tax people who have hybrids by making them put GPS tracking devices in their cars so they can be taxed based upon the miles driven and not the petrol they purchase. The state of Oregon has gone one step farther and is actually trying the idea on an experimental basis. The tax is levied each time you purchase petrol (hybrids do have to buy gas); a microprocessor in the fuel pump accesses the digital odometer of the car and uses the value therein to calculate the tax. Astute people should take note that this would, in all probability, be a radio frequency transmission. I will leave where I'm going with that as an exercise to the reader...

Scary news from Bruce Schneier: The SHA-1 message digest algorithm has been broken. A research team from Shandong University in China has discovered a method of generating sets of data that have the same hash value as other sets of data, meaning that you can have multiple files that give the same result.. which makes digital signatures that utilise the SHA-1 algorithm suspect, possibly unreliable. Their paper and evidence are out there but only a few people have copies of it right now. Once I get my hands on it, I'll post it so that everyone can read it. Some parts of the United States government are aware of this and are advising that everyone take a good, hard look at cryptographic systems in deployment now, and perhaps considering migration in the near future. Reducing the number of attempts to guess an alternate data set from 2^80 to 2^69 might not seem like much, but when you compare how long it would take to generate a match, 2^69 attempts is a much smaller, and much more computationally available period of time.

Tonight John and Lara took me out for my birthday for dinner at.. I want to say Chick-Fil-A, because it was fast food and chicken, though somewhat higher quality than Chick-Fil-A is. The name of the place didn't sink into my short term memory, which I suppose is some indication of the place. Anyway, it was good food and I actually rather enjoyed it.. this was before going to the advance screening of Constantine, based on DC Comics' Hellblazer, if you're not familiar with the name.

I'm not a Hellblazer fan; everything I know about it I know from reading Sandman, which is to say I don't know much at all about it. That said, I enjoyed it because it was an action movie with supernatural elements to it. I didn't enjoy it because it was a good movie, because it wasn't a good movie. It wasn't a downright bad movie, but it was definitely not one that's near the top of my list of favourites, unless you refer to the list of movies that I like to sit back and make fun of.

First of all.. Keanu Reeves forgot how to act after The Devil's Advocate and still hasn't remembered how. He does, however, play a good asshole, which John Constantine certainly is. He's got some good lines which are good straightlines for wisecracks from the audience. Hollywood felt compelled to give Constantine a plucky companion (says John); as to why, neither of us could quite fathom the reason. Thankfully, Constantine didn't go about slinging mojo as if he were one of the characters of Dragonball Z, which was a concern given the trailer.

Some of the scenes reminded me a great deal of the Underworld as described by White Wolf Games in Wraith. If you have ever wondered exactly what the maelstrom might look like, this movie will give you a good impression.

The point-of-view-flying-through-the-air sequence is straight out of Forever Knight; I found myself humming the theme at that point.

The scene in the boardroom left me with one thought which left me helpless in a fit of giggles: "Grant me the power to bring the world revolution!"

I was still pretty fried from the trip to DC last weekend so I decided to stay local and take it easy last night. After dinner I wound up working some more on the prototype rings for my costume for Tekkoshocon; as it turns out, the brand-new block of silver Sculpey I had in my stash of craft supplies was just what I needed. After some false starts I decided to just go with a simple strip of clay, rolled out thinly and sized more or less to my finger, and in short order worked up eight of them (more attempts, more possible successes). Trying to take a mold of an existing ring didn't work out; trying to carve a block to shape (more or less) for later finishing hasn't been very succesful in the past, neither last night nor in previous weeks.

We'll see how well they work tomorrow night when I start playing around with them.

A contractor hired by the government to rebuild in Iraq, Custer Battles LLC (Limited Liability Corporation) of Fairfax, Virginia is known to have defrauded the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq of millions of American Dollars and the US government is turning a blind eye to this. They were paid over $15mus to provide security services at Baghdad International Airport when there was absolutely no air traffic entering or leaving that airport.. guarding an empty, unused complex is worth $15mus? Is that the equivelent of the Fifth Institute or something? Due to the military shakeup in Iraq, the CPA wasn't able to keep tight track of how money was flowing, but now that they've had a chance to catch their collective breath.. they're not happy.

In other pleasant news, a new strain of HIV is in the wild that is the most aggressive to date. This particular strain of the virus is resistant to all of the anti-AIDS drugs that they've thrown at the men infected with it; one of the men, who lives in New Jersey, was diagnosed in December of 2004, and just three months later now shows the full gamut of symptoms of the deadly disease. The outbreak has been traced back to this one man and his partners, many of whom were frequent users of methamphetamine (which is often injected intravenously, possibly with shared hypodermic needles).

On the software patent front, word's gotten around that Bill Gates tried to blackmail the Danish Prime Minister by threatening to lay off eight hundred employees of the company Navision if he continued to oppose the European Union's proposed software patent laws. It is said that the CEO of Philips also tried to pressure the Dutch government on the same front.

Choicepoint, which I've ranted about in the past, now has most of an omelette covering its corporate face because criminals posing as customers raided them for between 30k and 35k records in their databases. The corporation, which serves as an information brokerage service for whomever can pay to access records on just about every person living in the United States, notified thousands of people living in California that their records, which include Social Security and driver's licence numbers, were accessed by persons unknown who had set up fifty shell corporations registered as customers to cover their tracks. Because California state law mandates that such breaches of security must be announced, it's anyone's guess as to whether or not records for other states were compromised.. the rest of the country may never know. The best advice that Choicepoint has is "continue to check your credit reports frequently for the next year." They won't even release details relevant to the people whose identities they have by the short and curlies because it might compromise the case.

Thanks heaps, guys. Way to perform due dilligence and make sure that your data isn't misused.

Stuff like this makes me wonder if some psychiatrists aren't sampling their own pharmaceuticals a little too heavily on their lunch hour. The article opens with the tale of the son of one Jennifer DeWeese and the 'problems' he was having: Irritability, sleeping short periods of time, and getting cranky whenever his routine changed.

DeWeese says that her divorce from their father and her own hospitalisations for kidney disease affected her children adversely.

Children not even old enough to tie their shoelaces are being put on powerful psychotropics that were designed for the neurochemistry of an adult. Side effects include obesity, diabetes, hormonal disruptions (which can adversely impact the normal human growth pattern), and even death. Other drugs prescribed weren't even designed for mental disorders but other conditions, such as cerebral palsy or epilepsy. What these drugs are doing to the development of the central nervous system of these kids is anybody's guess; the brains of children aren't fully developed, and if you go messing around with them in this delicate state, you'll impair the growth and activity of the seat of human consciousness. Now we've got eighteen-month old babies on Prozac and Lithium.. ever wonder if maybe this is why the US is in the state it's in? Now we've got kids running around blowing each other away as if life is little more than a trinket won at a state fair. Maybe what these kids need is a little patience and perhaps a crack across the ass for acting up when they bloody well know better.

I read this article thinking about some of the stuff these kids are reputed to do, like sassing teachers and disrupting life at home. If I tried that more than once when I was a kid, I wouldn't have been able to sit for a week because I'd have gotten a wooden spoon a couple of times across my ass. You know what? I never did that stuff again, and have trouble even considering doing it now. Why? I was taught in no uncertain terms that you don't do that shit. When you're at the dinner table, you sit and eat. When you're in class, you sit and let the teacher talk (even the obvious drones.. that's what hiding other textbooks inside textbooks is for). But you don't up and cause trouble.

It's called discipline, people. Drugs aren't a substitute for it. This "it's not a parenting issue" crap is just that.

But now I think I'll stop ranting. I feel, for whatever reason, like reflecting a little on life. As I sit here now, drinking a glass of white wine and munching on chocolate, for fully one half of me would celebrate in no other way than the traditional one, I can't help but think about everything that's happened in the past calendar year.

I've moved away from the family homestead and my laboratory, so carefully constructed over the years I've been here. I found an apartment of my own which I've moved into and set up in a manner both pleasing and useful to me (which I will one day take pictures of, I promise), and which I can now call home. I once again have pets, albeit of the piscine variety. I have plants now, too: An aloe vera plant and a pothos plant, which I am told is very like myself in temperament (quiet, impossible to kill, and able to thrive just about anywhere). I found a new job which not only gives me the opportunity to learn but support myself comfortably and with little fear (being a temp isn't a stable life). I've made multiple drives on my own, both across the state of Pennsylvania and all over the eastern seaboard. I've begun working seriously toward a certification (the CISSP), which I hope to finally take once I've got enough money saved up. I've begun digging out and replacing all of the programming and conditioning that I've had stuck inside my head since high school, when I arrived here. I've fallen in love with someone whom I care for very much, and who accepts me for who and what I am. I've begun craft-type things again, and also picked up the saxophone from time to time in an attempt to start playing again (which I will start doing again soon, I swear).

I've grown another year older and wiser. I've made mistakes and I've learned from them. I've had some close shaves, too.

This evening after work I drove back to the homestead for dinner with Dataline, who shares my birthday. For a change this year we didn't do anything elaborate or expensive, we ordered pizza and sat with my grandfather and talked for the first time in a while. We talked so much we even forgot to bake the cake we'd so carefully planned out. My grandfather gave me a Giant Eagle gift card to buy groceries with (which will come in handy in the week to come). Dataline gave to me a Galileo thermometer, a copy of Evolution on DVD, and a leather (!!!) button-down shirt (which I plan on getting a lot of wear out of). Alexius and Taja stopped by to drop off their gifts, a stack of vintage Doctor Who fanzines (that noise you heard earlier tonight was me squeeing), carefully wrapped in archival plastic. I've got some reading to do soon...

While I was in DC this weekend past, Lyssa and I exchanged gifts for Valentine's day.. a watercolour card of a dark elf and a pair Marvel Super Special comic adaptations of two movies I'm not ashamed to say that I'm a fan of, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai and David Lynch's Dune. For my birthday, she'd commissioned a drawing of Morpheus and Titania from Neil Gaiman's Sandman from M.W.Kowds (I think - I'm having trouble with the signature), who did some of the covers for another of Gaiman's series, The Books of Magic.

In case anyone out there would like to check out Fullmetal Alchemist before it plays one episode at a time (dubbed) on the Cartoon Network, check out this BitTorrent tracker. And in case you're having problems with some Torrents, maybe you've got the same 'problem' that a lot of the Gnutella nets have, and that's an old client. Welcome to the upgrade treadmill.

What a weekend.. I drove down to DC to visit Lyssa for Valentine's Day weekend and wound up getting more done than I thought I would. The components for her new computer arrived and I rode shotgun with her while she assembled everything. Her first attempt last week was less than successful - something kept causing the Windows installer to bluescreen (the text mode, first stage installer, mind you), and it wasn't immediately apparent what the underlying cause was. As it turned out, it was the fault of her new mainboard's disk interfaces.

Lyssa's new mainboard has the capability to handle storage out the wazoo: One standard parallel ATA drive chain, two parallel ATA drive chains attached to a hardware RAID controller, and four serial ATA interfaces. Maximum disk space: The gods only know; bring your chequebook.

The mainboard's firmware seems to have a bug in it, though: If you connect a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive to any drive channel but the primary parallel ATA chain, however, the system may not boot up stably. We managed to get the new system to boot but the installer bluescreened. By pulling all of the drive bays and connecting the DVD-ROM drive as the slave on the primary chain, everything worked fine. Once Windows was installed and configured with sane defaults, we spent the next nine hours trying to install service pack two for Windows XP; that in itself was a singular hell that required much hacking of the Windows registry.

Around 0400 EST Saturday morning, Lyssa and I crashed for the next eight hours or therabouts. After waking up we spent more time trying to get Windows patched and set up safely, then got dressed and headed to the diner for a late lunch and a chance to stretch our legs. After a meal of fine college-town Greek fare, we attempted to drive to Target to get a new keyboard and mouse for Alphonse, and spent the next hour stuck in the traffic jam known as the Target parking lot after deciding that we were just going to give up and head home. More hacking and tracing connections inside Alphonse's chassis was done to connect the last of the system monitors (thermistors all over the place!) and cooling fans (two came standard with the chassis). Lyssa and I drove out to Franklin's for Valentine's Day dinner after we got the last of the leads in place. Franklin's is probably one of my favourite restaurants in the area; the food is expensive but good and well worth the price. The place was packed by 1800 EST, and we killed time wandering around the store on the side of the building until a booth was found for us. They've got lots of neat stuff in their (country-style) store, like candy in bulk, toys and novelties for kids, and all sorts of microbrews in the back. The service, once we were seated, was fast and competant, which is a surprising amount to get for one of the busiest weekends of the year. It'll probably be SRO tonight.

We stopped back at Lyssa's apartment briefly after dinner and drove out to Rialian's place in Maryland to spend the evening with everyone. Rialian and Helen were brewing up a new batch of mead, and they'd invited some folks over to join in the fun. Lyssa and I arrived late, so we missed the batch but we did get to hang out with a house full of folks and cats. And reptiles of various kinds, but I only got to see the one lizard in the living room.

Rialian's mead is powerful stuff. It's not strong in a "this tastes like Everclear and bleach" kind of way, but in a "Hi, I want to be your friend, so I'll clock you with a tire iron between the eyes in ten minutes" kind of way. Drinking it doesn't make you feel inhebriated, but it does make you suddenly aware of the pulses in your temples and a gradual sense of well being.

Seven of us sat around that night talking about most everything you can think of (and a few that may have slipped your mind a while ago). We touched on everything from applied neurochemistry to prosthetics to some of the nastiest politics that I've ever been glad to have slipped through with nary a scratch. Rialian's place, I'm given to understand, is neat like that.

I think Lyssa and I eventually got home around 0300 EST Sunday morning, and fell asleep around 0345 EST. We slept straight through until noon or therabouts, at which time I made breakfast for us, as I'd promised. It's been years since I made bacon, however (I try to avoid pork as a rule) so it rendered down as it should have.. and then burned. Thankfully, there was still bacon left in the package, so we got that fried up and served without further incident. As we ate breakfast (well, lunch, at any rate) Alphonse busily copied files from Lili's old drive over to the new hard drives Lyssa had installed the day previous. That afternoon we headed out once again, this time to the grocery store to stock up, and spent a little more time together. Dinner consisted of leftovers from Franklin's the previous night and Friday night, and some stuff that we'd picked up from the grocery store.

Grocery store sushi, even vegetarian sushi, isn't worth it. Give me a good restaurant for sushi any day.

Which Sin Are You?
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