You will be devoured by mice. You are so shy and
always off alone in the corner. No one knows
you are there except for the blood thirsty
rodents.
What will be your Edward Gorey death?
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Phase two of the move finished late last night. All of Lyssa's stuff has been moved out of her apartment and trucked over to mine. After days and days of hell, it's finally done.
Thanks to everyone out there who came out to help us haul stuff, and who joined us for pizza afterward: the.Silicon.Dragon, Elwing, Butterfly, Tantric Chef, Tiger-Phoenix and the kids, Mark, Hasufin, Steve and Lauren, Grant, and Kash. The beer will be forthcoming. Apologies to everyone whose names I forgot; I'll update this list as I can.
After a slight misadventure on the part of Kash and I picking up the moving van (never, ever go with U-Haul; rent from somebody elsee, like Penske or Budget Rentacar), namely, my debit card being so badly damaged that it didn't register in the dealership's reader, necessitating a quick drive to an ATM so that I could withdraw enough cash to pay the bill and deposit, we loaded it up with Lyssa's stuff inside of two hours flat, which has to be a world record. The drive to the new place required a caravan down the Capital Beltway, linked by cellphones and FRS radios with a six-mile range (gifts from the gods, I tell you). With everyone moving boxes simultaneously, we emptied the van in less than an hour, then drove to the storage facility to get all of my stuff, including the furniture. Much to our surprise, this took less than two hours itself, and resulted in a much neater packing job in the van. A five minute drive to the apartment later, and we began the task of unloading.
Our balcony is unusable for loading and unloading stuff because it's a good ten feet off the ground, so we'd have had to set up a pulley system from the balcony above us, but because we're technically on the ground floor (only five steps up) it wasn't really that bad.. only an hour was necessary.
All told, we were finished by 2000 EDT.
I'd kept a slush fund for dinner that night, because Lyssa and I had promised everyone who came out pizza and beer afterward. We wound up passing on the beer but Pizza Hut was more than capable of feeding fifteen hungry movers, many of whom hadn't eaten at all that day.
My body still hates me for eating out so much. Can't be helped when there isn't any food left in the house and all of your cookware's boxed up and MIA.
Yesterday, Lyssa, Kash, and I drove back to Lyssa's to get the last of the little stuff, and to clean up one last time. Her apartment was nice but really needed a onceover for the next tenant... ask me about that sometime.
This morning, my commute to work was less than twenty minutes, and I even found it without trouble.
Next step: Unpack and set up. And fight to get my DSL line connected.
The rock band INXS is searching for a new frontman after the suicide of Michael Hutchence in 1997. After this nine-year sabbatical from the music scene, they've decide to do this using a reality television show.
CommVEx (the Commodore Vegas Expo) and DefCon 13 are behing held the same weekend in Las Vegas, Nevada...
Damn. Wish I had money and vacation time. Between those two events and being in the desert, that sounds like paradise. You can bet I'd be at both events, with my trusty C=64 (which I hope still works) slung over my shoulder on a guitar strap.
Maintenance is dragging its feet: The drains in the bathroom are stopped up so thoroughly that three bottles of drain cleaner have not fixed things yet. They have yet to go to the apartment and do what they're paid to do. Covad, who owns the physical phone lines in our area, is also stalling on hooking up the pair leading to our apartment to the phone line in the punchdown in the basement. I guess they don't like the fact that we're getting a naked line, i.e., a phone line with no dialtone for DSL only, because we're going voice-over-IP.
I quiet smoking for this?
Phase two of the move starts today. U-Haul screwed us; the rental office screwed us last night by closing at 1800 EDT, so we couldn't actually do anything moving related last night. Out of touch for a couple of days.
No time to sit and write. No time to breathe. Can't hear - ears are still ringing.
Lyssa and I start phase two of the move tonight, which is moving her stuff to the new apartment. My stuff comes out of storage tomorrow.
No time to sleep, either, I guess.
The founder of Go computers has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft, claiming that MS took 'covert action' to kill their handwriting recognition computer interface, called PenPoint, by pressuring Intel into pulling its funding of Go Computers and threatening the major computer manufacturers of the time to not include the PenPoint software.
I can sort of believe this because MS has a history of strongarming computer companies into not bundling software they don't like (such as Linux and StarOffice back in 1997 and 1998) and see as a threat. I doubt that this case will go anywhere, though, because we all know how much Microsoft fears antitrust lawsuits... and we also know the penalties they've suffered from being found guilty in several of them in the past decade.
Police in London, England are downplaying rumours of suicide bombers yesterday in the media, in an attempt to keep the waters relatively clear during the investigation into the four explosions during rush hour yesterday.
The picture in this article jumped out at me this morning. I sort of wish that I rode the Metro to work just to see such an awesome sight first-hand.. a police officer in riot gear, carrying a rifle as he patrolled the metro car. Damn scary a sight it would have been, too. Only a day late, the US government has raised the alert level to orange for US public transit systems. Riot cops, hardware, and police dogs are all over the place.
Where I am in Virginia right now, I see no increased police presence on the highways or in any buildings I've been in so far. Same with the few places I travel to en route to work in Maryland or DC. If they're out this far, they're keeping a low, low profile. If anybody in my area with RF ears is listening for unusual radio traffic picks anything up, let me know via e-mail (usual communication protocols apply).
They're already blaming Al Quaida for the London bombings. The MO seems to fit, and they did come very near the beginning of the G8 summit, which is attended by countries who have troops in Iraq. A group called "The Secret Organisation of Al Quaida in Europe" has claimed responsibility; whether or not this is a legitimate claim is unknown at this time (anyone can claim to be Al Quaida; it isn't like they carry membership cards or anything) and probably get away with it.
Sven Jaschan, age nineteen, admitted creator of the Sasser worm has been convicted of illegally altering data. He's been given a suspended sentence of one year and nine months.
William Gibson has a new article in Wired Online, entitled God's Little Toys. Give it a read.
In Detroit, Michigan, honors student Diedra Stokes won her civil liberties case in court after being arrested for refusing to show her identification to a police officer. The way that US law is structured, you only have to produce identification if you are driving a vehicle and a police officer asks you to produce ID, or if you are crossing the US border into or out of the country. Stokes was charged with "impeding pedestrian traffic," one of those laws that stays on the books to give police a way to arrest people they can't pin anything else on, a tactic which cuts both ways, as this case shows. The charges were dismissed after officer Jamale Turner did not show up for the hearing. Stokes was asked to leave the place that she was waiting for a pickup by her mother by officer Turner, and after refusing to do so and refusing to produce identification, she was arrested briefly before release into her mother's custody. The precedent used is the 1979 case of Michigan v. DeFillippo in the US Supreme Court, which struck down the Detroit, Michigan "Stop and identify" ordinance as being Unconstitutional. It should be noted, however, that you should give your name to police if asked, and do not do so at your own peril.
New technical term: frobble - noun - Situation where two or more people are working on the same nonsharable resource, and each thinks they've lost their minds because settings keep changing out from under them without warning. This is due to each user changing a setting and committing the changes, only to have another user change it to a different value. This battle of the keyboards tends to go on for several minutes and mystify the users until they actually speak to one another in an attempt to figure out the problem.
New technical term: hot-swap cable - noun - Length of network cable strung up, down, around, over, under, and through computer center hardware racks that looks very important at first, but after tracing it the admins discover that neither end is connected to anything, ostensibly in case an existing network cable catches fire in the middle of the afternoon and needs to be replaced with a minimum of downtime. Synonyms: standby cable, hot standby cable, cat-6e to go, waste of space.
Busy as hell. Running all over creation for work. Updates sporadic until after the move.
Sven Jaschan of Germany, the creator of the Sasser worm which took Windows by storm in May of 2004 has gone on trial in juvenile court in his home village of Waffensen. He is in juvenile court at this time because of his age at the time of the worm outbreak (17).
Microsoft announced that Longhorn would not give user accounts administrative access by default. Didn't they say that about Windows XP? And didn't they yank that because of how many apps (Microsoft's most of all) that broke?
What in the hell happened while I was gone?? At o-dark-thirty EDT today, six explosions, timed to go off within seconds of one another, went off in London, England during their rush hour. The detionations occurred in the vicinities of Edgware Road, King's Cross, Liverpool Street, Russel Square, Aldgate East, Moorgate, and Tavistock Square. The London Underground and all bus service have been suspended indefinitely. Rumour has it that the Israeli embassy in London recieved warning mere minutes before the explosions. A number of groups have stepped up to the plate and published press releases taking credit for the exposions. Scotland Yard is playing its cards very close to its chest right now; they're not saying anything yet. Unconfirmed reports have it that there were similariities to the explosions in Madrid, Spain in 2004 in terms of tactics and timing. No engineering analyses of the bombs' remains have been published yet, if indeed any have been done yet (which I doubt). The US DHS, surprisingly, has announced that it has no intention of raising the national threat level (for once), and that they had no idea this was going to happen (bullshit - what is the NSA doing if not monitoring communications all over the globe, playing hangman?!?)
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has condemned the attacks, and blamed terrorists for the explosions. He was quoted as saying that they were specifically aimed to disrupt the opening of the G8 summit.
You know, I forgot all about the G8 summit this week...
Another news report confirms the rumour that the Israeli embassy was warned. Israeli representatives are, at this time, attending the G8 summit.
www.g8.gov.uk is getting hammered at this time, so you probably won't get through.
I just found out that Dataline's going in for gallbladder removal surgery on Monday, 25 July 2005.
At the bank this morning, I chanced to overhear an older woman with a distinctly British accent cashing in all of her traveller's cheques so that she could fly back to London - she mentioned that she had not heard from her children, who work in London after repeated attempts to contact them, and wanted to get back as soon as she possibly could.
Ye gods. That sent a chill down my back. Ma'am, if you ever read this, I wish you and yours well. I hope that they were not injured in the blasts.
DSL's out in Lyssa's apartment again. Thank you, Verizon.
How in the hell did I get to work in half an hour?!?
I think I left the apartment a lot earlier than I thought but didn't look at the time. No matter, it's giving me a chance to get the utilities hooked up at the new apartment before the real workload sets in.
George W. Bush refuses to change his opinion on global warming, presented evidence to the contrary after British Prime Minister Tony Blair asks him to uphold his end of the bargain.. Bush was further quoted as saying that he will refuse to agree to any environmental protection measures that appear to do the same thing as the Kyoto Protocols, which were enacted to prevent change in the global environment in response to pollution. I find it interesting that a change of stance was part of their agreement, in exchange for public and private support of the Second War in Iraq(tm)... and less than surprising that Bush is welshing on his end of the deal. This comes mere days before the G8 summit in Scotland, which is a meeting of the minds of world leaders on whatever issues the leader of the hosting country sees fit to bring up. Bush did, however, say taht he's pushing for investment in research into alternative fuels, such as hydrogen-powered vehicles and nuclear energy. If you do a little research, though, you'll find that he's utterly full of it - in 2003 Bush slashed funding of research into renewable energy sources. He also wrecked enegy conservation measures with an earlier budget. This is only a small fraction of the measures he's put into place that are setting back the pace of scientific progress in the United States.
I'd just like to say that this guy wasn't arrested and convicted for installing a modchip in an Xbox - he was convicted for selling modchipped Xboxen that he'd illegally installed up to 80 cracked commercial games on. Technically, it's illegal to modify game consoles in the European Union (free use, anyone?), but that isn't really what they nailed him on.
Get it right, guys.
To everyone in the United States, happy Independence Day.
On Independence Day, it behoves patriotic Americans to know something about their founders, does it not?
You know this is going to cause one hell of a dustup, pardon the pun: The United Church of Christ has officially stated its support of same-sex marriage. Kudos, folks.
Six boxes of Lyssa's stuff, mostly books, are now packed up and ready to go. The rest of the apartment remains; the rest of the apartment is trashed, actually, from our pulling stuff out and moving it around to make room for the boxes.
After breakfast today I headed out to Target to pick up a few things, like boxes, packing tape, and another set of cotton pants to wear to work (they beat the hell out of jeans in this weather, let me tell you). As I left my trust car in the parking lot I was accosted by an older gentleman ranting and marvelling loudly at the T and A of a woman he'd seen in the mall mere minutes before.
Whatever, man.
I found what I needed in fairly short order - the soap, paper shredder, and packing tape are pretty standard. After some asking around I came away from the store with fifteen collapsed cardboard boxes stuffed in various parts of my car. Free shipping crates are always a good thing.
The afternoon was spent driving around looking for lunch in a town where damn near everything closes on July Fourth and stuffing things into the aforementioned boxes. We still have a large number remaining, and I doubt that we'll have any left over. Dinner tonight was at TGI Friday's, where we raided the Jack Daniels menu after a not-quite-wait; try both the chicken tenders and the JD burger. I didn't try the ribs.
Our waitress was attentive, perky, nice, and enthusiastic even after working time and a half in a restaurant. She did a yeoman's job, and impressed both Lyssa and myself.
As I write this, I can hear fireworks going off outside, the traditional celebration of Independence Day in the United States. I'm not big of fireworks; haven't been since I got here. I don't really consider them pretty or interesting to watch. I guess I know too much of the chemistry behind them. I do, however, adore getting together with folks for a picnic or a cookout on this day and spending quality time with my friends. I haven't gotten to do that for a few years, and I miss it.
I almost wish that I could go outside and see them. I can hear them all the way down here, where I now sit. Unfortunately, the Capital Mall is standing room only for July Fourth, and you can't really see anything unless you somehow manage to get up high, like in a building that happens to be open in downtown Washington, DC today. Driving in or taking the Metro are foolhardy today, due to all the people.
Oh, well.
I still feel out of sorts from this whole move, first from Pennsylvania to DC, then from DC to Virginia proper. Living like a (well equipped) fiddler crab moving from apartment to apartment, skimming the Beltway to expedite my work.. it's odd. It's tiring. I haven't been anyplace to really put down roots for a while, and I'm starting to miss the stability. I miss having a place that I've control over, where I can relax and plug myself in. Now that we've started packing up Lyssa's apartment, it's feeling less and less like a home.
Friday night. Friday night and we'll have a home.
Maybe I'll have my head together enough to be able to write coherently for a change. As it is, my thoughts are going in so many directions at once, I have a difficult time arranging ideas. I'm fairly certain that it's the essential rootlessness of it all - I need to settle down. I need a place that I can call 'home' to think and write.
Haven't been home much today; Lyssa and I met her folks to go to the movies, where we say War of the Worlds this afternoon, and afterwards went to The Cheesecake Factory for dinner.
War of the Worlds isn't a sci-fi movie; it's a horror movie that just happens to have some things in common with a famous book by H.G.Wells and has been worked over (note that I do not say 'worked on' or even 'directed') by Stephen Spielburg. Tom Cruise plays Tom Cruise and not a ubermensch like he has in the past few movies he's been in; an everyman who comes face to face with the Unknown, in the form of an alien invasion years in the making.
The special effects are top-notch, naturally. The acting's okay at best, embarrassingly bad at worst. Some of the dialogue is cheesy. The alien craft are very well done, and creepy as all get out. The movie, however, degenerates into splatter about a half-hour in. There are also some plot holes that made me want to stand up and yell at the characters, "You idiots! You're watching it happen to other countries on TV but you're not using what you've learned to save yourselves!"
The crazy guy in the woods and the monologues at the start and end of the movie are taken right from the radio play, which was a nice touch.
After it goes horror, it starts getting needlessly gory. So much so that I was really squicked by it. Spielburg centered a lot on the traumatic aspects of the movie, so much so that it actually ceased to be scary and started getting annoying. Specifically, I got bored with all the close-ups on Cruise's face that showed him stunned or crying. The bit with Ray's (Cruise's character) two kids also left me facepalming. The daughter was either a basket case or preternaturally sane; the son really needed to be incinereated by the aliens' heat rays.
The conflict between Ray and which kid to save was.. I'm not sure what it was supposed to be. Nuance and subtlty are good things. But when you go for nuances, pick one and stick with it, don't pack them on layer after layer like makeup on a cheap hooker.
The red vines that were crawling across the planet after the invasion began were a nice touch, harking back to the tales of H.P.Lovecraft. The landing of the aliens was also very Lovecraftian, The Colour Out of Space in particular. I drew the line at the ships hoovering people up, though.
The alien away team was scary was hell, though, and was very well done.
And how in the hell is it that the entire planet gets razed by the aliens, but the ritziest part of Boston, Massachusett's was completely overlooked???
As for the ending, and I don't think I'm giving anything away here because it's the same ending as the book, radio play, and original movie (as well as the opening of the old TV series) - how can the aliens bury their craft on Earth so many, many years ago (perhaps thousands) but then not take into account the other lifeforms in Earth's biosphere which no longer affect humans? How does such an oversight happen when you plan your invasion with such a timescale??
One star. Don't bother.
In hindsight, I should have known that the movie was going to suck - Duo of the Lost Boys and Rhianna loved it. And they adore hideously bad movies.
After leaving the movie, the five of us drove down highway 7 to The Cheesecake Factory, which is an excellent restaurant, if I may be honest. The calamari is tender and fresh, the spinach and cheese dip is tasty but not too heavy, and the vegetable curry pot pie is excellent.. it would be amazing if it weren't for the puzzle factor, i.e., the curry was in the dish and a large puffed bread was placed on top of it. It wasn't made as a pot pie, but a two part meal which was very large - a single meal is enough for two people, easily. I couldn't finish the main course, and the thought of dessert (we brought home two pieces of cheesecake) makes me cringe.
I recommend getting the cheesecake for dessert to go - it's fantastic.
Half a flaregun. Excellent service, wonderful food, good prices.
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Fred Phelps is at it again, and of course he's too much of a chickenshit to go to his own protests, instead sending his family and congregation while he stays behind.
T-minus five days and counting. Lyssa and I start moving into our apartment in Virginia Friday night after work. We start packing tomorrow, and we get the moving van on either Friday or Saturday, depending on when U-Haul gets back to us.
The truck will be necessary for Lyssa's stuff - it's a long way from her doss to the new place. My stuff, however, is stored relatively close to the new doss so the truck is only necessary to speed things up. Once Lyssa's stuff is offloaded a team of folks will go down to the storage facility to start moving my stuff, including all the furniture.
In hindsight, I probably shouldn't have brought so much furniture with me. I admit, I'm attached to my bookshelves, though I wound up tossing two of them because they were old and falling apart.
I rather regret bringing the little couch, too. Lyssa and I are eyeing futons, so we'll just have to get rid of the couch anyway.
Casualties thus far: My mounted Johnny Mnemonic poster (with a hole through it courtesy of a falling shipping module which I'm also pretty sure contains my alter stuff, including my Commodore-64). I'm afraid to see what else might have been managed.
It's my fault, too - I didn't secure them properly. Fuck.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
Last night after work, Lyssa, Hasufin, and I drove out to Coldstone Creamery for ice cream after work, which was a first for me. Coldstone, if you have never been to it, is an ice cream parlour with some very unusual sorts of ice cream (black licorace, which really is dark black, for example), some excellent versions of some old favourites (like vanilla and strawbery), and some very tasty sorbets as well (like tangerine). The idea is that you specify what you'd like mixed into your ice cream and someone behind the counter lays some ice cream out on a refrigerated marble slab and pounds, mixes, and swirls your choices into the ice cream. I love soft ice cream, and I've discovered that I'm quite fond of Coldstone. Lyssa disagrees.
Ah, well. I like what I like, albeit in moderation.
Today's been a slow day, and for the most part a lazy one. I woke up around 1000 EDT to the phone ringing - Hasufin at work ran into some unexpected problems, and as the admin on call I was next in line. Thankfully, I didn't have to drive in to work on anything, because he was able to fix the problem with some consultation and examining the software for a while.
Lyssa and I went to the grocery store this afternoon to get stuff for dinner tonight and for the next few days.. I'm still getting used to this whole living together thing. It's a new expeience, I have to admit. How do I manage time with Lyssa and for myself? With a lot of communication. I could theroetically go out every night, if I chose. The idea that I could do so still strikes me as odd. Lyssa can as well, if she likes, and from time to time she has. That does not seem odd to me, but the fact that I could is.. new? Odd? A little frightening? All of the above.
It's the things that seem ordinary to everyone that I treasure.. going to the store, lounging around the apartment, driving around for the hell of it.. I never thought I'd get to share it with anyone, and now I am.
It's a good feeling. I find it a little scary, too.
I'm still getting used to wanting to read or check my e-mail while Lyssa's around, though. It feels like I'm shutting her out, even though when she does the same thing, it doesn't bother me at all.
Something else to adapt to.
Gods.. there's so much that I want to write about right now. Weeks and weeks of suff happening.. it'll take hours.
I feel that I should give everyone a heads-up about a restaurant in downtown DC called Al Tiramisu, which Lyssa, Hasufin, and I had dinner at about two weeks ago. It's a tiny little hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant that we were hideously underdressed for (we were dressed like college students, and the rest of the patrons were after-hours professional types). The waitstaff is very, very polite; the food is very, very good; and they they appear only when you don't have your mouth full and look ready for more. They also bring out bottled water to keep you happy until whatever else you've ordered is ready.
What they don't tell you is that the bottled water is $6us per bottle. You can go through two or three bottles of water in one meal. I don't know how much the wine is because I didn't check.
The fact that there are no prices on anything should have been my first warning. Each entree is between $10us and $20us per plate. The desserts are very tasty and filling, though smaller than one would expect, and hover around $8.90us each. Coffee starts at $3us per cup and isn't bottomless or refilled.
We accidentally dropped $103us on a dinner for three there, which nearly broke the bank.
Their address is 2014 P Street NW; Washington, DC 20036, voice number 202-467-4466. Good food, but very expensive. Don't go there unless you really feel like dropping a lot of money.
I could comment on the bottled water in itself, the price aside (the bottles' labels looked very worn; it wouldn't surprise me if they had been refilled from the tap a couple of times each). This is something I expect of a less classy (and less pricy) restaurant someplace other than the core of Washington, DC.
Somehow I made it to work in record time today, not because I went any faster than usual (well, I did, but I wasn't speeding) but because I managed to hit one of those rare 'sweet spots' in timing and traffic patterns where the beltway wasn't a parking lot during rush hour. Sure, there were one or two slowdowns but on the whole I was able to make it to work in about forty minutes, about one third of my usual time in the mornings.
Maybe it was the fact that I got out the door about ten minutes earlier than usual because I packed leftovers for lunch instead of making lunch for myself. At any rate, I'm not going to complain because I found it a refreshing change of pace from the usual commute.
One of the largest credit bureaus in the country, MBNA, was purchased lock, stock, and barrel by the Bank of America for $35bus in funds and stock. This will make the Bank of America effectively the largest credit bureau in the United States by giving them a 20% share of the market. The BofA is working on the acquisition of all of the lowest-risk credit companies, one by one.
The UK is still targetted by crackers with specially tailored trojan horse attacks. The attacks, as mentioned earlier, are specifically targetted at certain organisations, and the software used in the assaults appears to have been designed with keeping a low profile (read: samples out of the hands of the AV companies) as a priority. Now, vulnerabilities in Microsoft Word are being used to install malware on vulnerable workstations. Somebody, it appears, really has a mad-on for these guys, even after they've hit the newswires.
One Tom Adelstein mentioned in an article earlier this week. This organisation is known to have funded a number of trips that have been implicated in ethics violations among certain members of the House of Representatives.. astute readers will know whom I write of. New names of representatives have been added to this list of violators of the House Ethics Code, incidentally. After a certain point, however, the firm of Preston, Gates, and Ellis drops off the radar of companies implicated in this mess. It becomes more interesting when you find out that Melinda French Gates is also on the board of directors of the Washington Post, one of the more influential newspapers that have been covering this matter. I strongly suggest that you read the scanned documents included with this article; they are very interesting and very revealing. Not only does Microsoft control a lot of money, they have some control over a large number of people, many of whom used to work in the US government. The list of people who are not pushing MS' antitrust penalties is also considerable: Among the people are the Undersecretary of commerce for Technology (Phil Bond) and Ed gillespie, the former head of the Republican National Committee. Those are some people with a lot of clout in the US.
Whoa. Steamboy, by Otomo Katsuhiro (director of Akira), has come to the US in theatrical release... or was, judging by the theatre listings for April and May. Time to prowl the local listings, I guess.
It's baaaaaack... H.J.Res.24 was put before the House of Representatives on 17 February 2005, which is a bill that would repeal the twenty-second amendnment. In case you're not familiar with it, the twenty-second amendment is what limits presidents to two terms only. This isn't the first time this has been attempted, and it probably won't be the last.
Another article, containing more information on the Freedom Tower to be constructed in New York City as a replacement for the World Trade Center has hit the newswires. In addition to the touchy-feely stuff, it has some interesting information on the architecture, placement, and armouring(!) of the building. The base of the building will be solid ferroconcrete with metal armouring reaching a height of 200 feet above the ground. There will be fewer windows in the structure. The base will be 200 feet on a side, and the whole structure will taper gently, assuming the form of an obelisk (cue firestorm on conspiracy theory mailing lists). The building will also have its own communications antenna, in addition to the usual backup generators and external communications feeds.
Something else to keep your eye on: George W. Bush has ordered the creation of national security departments within the FBI and DoJ, which brings them under the control of John Negroponte, the US Director of Intelligence. Incidentally, this puts the Director of Intelligence in the loop insofar as Federal investigations within the USA are concerned; Negroponte would have direct command over field agents on assignment. Whether or not the DoI would have priority control over the director of the FBI and the Attorney General is not clear. It should also be noted that another executive order was enacted on Wednesday, 29 June 2005, which permits freezing the assets of people, organisations, or companies that may be involved in trafficking weapons. You can check out the entire executive order here, at whitehouse.gov.
The name of this cross-organisational group this executive order has created? The National Security Service.
In other news, the US military is going to use Sony's Cell Chip in some of its computer systems. Yes, the very same CPU that will drive the Playstation-3.
Give this a look: OpenCRS.com. It's an archive of Congressional research reports - studies done for Congress about a wide variety of topics to keep them (theoretically) informed on what's going on in the world. They're a good way to keep track of what's happening in the world around you.
The human brain is probably not binary in its processing architecture. The studies done are interesting, using mouse cursor movements made as people process linguistic and visually symbolic data in a one-to-two manner (indentification) to determine what distinct states their brains were in. The experiments showed that processing began before the words they heard were even completed. The article is a bit thin on details, but it's definitely thought provoking.
Up side: I've just discovered that the ethernet cable I've been using to connect Luel to Lyssa's home LAN is long enough to reach the bathroom. I'm writing this update from the john.
Down side: While eating dinner tonight with Lyssa and Lauren at Plato's I took a tiny chip out of a molar (one of the ones on the bottom left side that I had filled just a few weeks ago) on some falafel. My jaw's still sending error messages (not pain but "What the hell was that?!" impulses). Fuck.
Richard Scrushy, former CEO of HealthSouth, which was defrauded of $2.7bus ,a href="http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2005-06-28-scrushy-cover-usat_x.htm">has been acquitted of all charges. Indicted two years ago, the man known for living (and acting) like a king got off scot free. Nevermind the fact that recorded conversations repeatedly showed him asking about whether or not he was being monitored by whomever he was speaking to and religiously keeping track of who in his staff knew how much of what was going on. Seems a little fishy to me. His lawyers used a brilliant tactic, making it look like witnesses against Scrushy were in even deeper trouble but cut deals with the prosecution to get off more lightly, when in fact Scrushy was the high man on the totem pole of this scam. Scrushy also made himself out to be a deeply religious and pure man by donating thousands (possibly up into the low millions) to churches around Birmingham, Alabama and appearing on weekly religious television programmes, as well as making ins with local pastors. The only thing he didn't do was nail himself to a crucifix; this tactic not only makes religion look bad, but insults the intelligence of anyone who knows even a little about this case.
Makes me sick.
They're going to try it again, I see: The design of the Freedom Tower, the successor to the World Trade Center, has been announced. It will be 69 stories (1,362 feet) high, and will feature a parapet and an observation deck, and is just as high as the old WTC. I have to admit, I'm rather ambivelant about this. I never got to see the old WTC, but that's not why. The last one was taken down by elements inimical to the values originally granted to citizens of the United States by the nation's founders, and it caused a shakeup around the globe. Now it's being replaced by a building just as ostentatious and probably more costly (allowing for inflation). Seems like a hell of a big target to me.
It took 'em two tries to take down the last one; I feel concern for this one, and it's not even built yet.
An American who was behind part of a million-dollar identity theft ring was sentenced to six years in prison in the UK on Monday. His partner, Lee Elwood of Glasgow, Scotland, was sentenced to four years after pleading guilty last year. The two were a pair of experienced phishers with a network of fake websites and illicitly obtained credit cards that kept them in the black for months, possibly netting them over $11.5mus. Things were purchased online with the fraudlent credit cards and then re-sold on various auction sites to launder them; the proceeds were then sent to accounts in Russia, but the two kept a cut of the proceeds for themselves. A hefty cut, if the released details are any indication. Credit cards as well as traveller's cheques were also forged by the duo - no mean feat when you think about the sophistication of anticounterfitting techniques today (as well as how difficult it can be to obtain certain devices used in the processes).
Robert Lyttle of Pleasant Hill, California, formerly a member of a group of crackers called The Deceptive Duo, has been sentenced to four months in prison and a $72kus fine for compromising comptuers run by the DoD's Defense Logistic Information Service and NASA in 2002. He plead guilty after his arrest in July of 2004. The other half of the Deceptive Duo, Ben Stark, has not yet been sentenced.
As if that weren't enough going on today, the country of Pakistan is completely off the Net. A failure in the transoceanic cables that link Pakistan to the rest of the net caused by a dead power supply at one end of the link or possibly in a repeater has left their sectors entirely gone. Hopefully they'll be back up soon.
I've come to the conclusion that travelling on the Beltway is like ADSL - driving down is faster than driving up. In other words, driving to anyplace is much faster than driving back during the week; we can debate the weekends, because it's hit or miss, depending on the precise hour of the day.
Now this is easily the most evil thing I've ever heard. The BTK (bind, torture, kill) serial killer who roamed Wichita, Kansas for over ten years has turned himself in, and is on trial at this time. Snippets of his testimony are in the article, and it's chilling: He talks about 'putting people down' as if they were animals, and talked about his life as a serial killer as if he were an anthropologist who had been studying them in the field.
The bit about comforting one of his earlier victims and even getting her water before suffocating her with a bag really freaked me, I don't mind telling you. I know that I can get down on the human race from time to time, but this is in another league, pure and simple. He has to be taken at his word on this, but it's not hard to imagine it going down (I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader).
Cold. Fucking cyrogenic.
More stuff to worry about: Another Indymedia server in the UK has been seized. This time, it was the server pertaining to Bristol's indie news scene. One member of the group was taken into custody during the raid. When last someone tried to find the person, the Bristol police reported that he was no longer in custody, and suggested that they try the British Transport Police, instead.
Prisoners mysteriously changing hands while in custody.. does that sound familiar to anyone, by any chance?
The story behind it goes like this: On 17 June 2005, an anonymous post was made in the comments of an article served from that machine stating that certain 'objects' were left on a train passing through the UK, near the time of the G8 summit this year. Rumour has it that around $100kus of damage was done by this action (note: I've no idea what they're referring to; if it happened while I was moving, I missed it, and don't have time to go back and look for it). The member was thrown out for doing this, and someone protested his expulsion. Then someone called the police.
Rialian, by popular demand, has organised a second gather at the Four Quarters Farm called Crossing the Thresholds. It has been confirmed to take place between 23-25 September 2005.
This was first published back in 1999, but for those of you who missed it: Video was extracted via electrode implants from a cat's brain. It wasn't in realtime, but after some hefty signal processing, they were able to determine with a high level of accuracy what the cat actually saw. The images are two parters: The top is frames of the video footage the cats were shown, the bottom is what the cats actually saw, as picked up by the electrode arrays that were monitoring clusters of ten neurons within the cat's hypothalamus.
Here's an interesting twist of events pertaining to the change in law that makes it easier for you to lose your land by emminent domain: A private developer in New Hampshire is trying to take over the land owned by Supreme Court Justice Davis Souter, who was one of the judges who voted in favour of this ruling, so that he may construct a new hotel. One Logan Clements is behind this ironic tack. His justification to the local government involves not only more tax revenues for the town than Judge Souter is paying, but it would represent the preservation of a unique piece of land - the home of a Supreme Court Justice "who was responsible for destroying property rights for all Americans." Clements is trying to raise capital from pro-liberty investers to set the wheels turning on his project.
Go, Clements, go. If I lived in New Hampshire, I'd sign off on it. Serves Souter right.
Wouldn't you know it...
Got up at 0600 EDT, got ready, and made it out the door to go to work. The beltway, as you'd expect, was a madhouse... I actually made good time (1 hour, 20 minutes).. and halfway through realised that I'd forgotten my keycard to get into the building.
Don't you just hate it when you get to work early but can't get in?
The DSL line at Lyssa's apartment is down, so neither of us can get on the Net from home; I spent a good hour on the phone with Verizon last night and after going over the troubleshooting procedure with their tech (who didn't seem surprised at all that I know a few things about TCP/IP), it was determined that either the DSL modem is going bad (and feeding back into the telephone hanging off of the splitter), the line is bad, or something at the CO is wonky. I'm going to pick up a new splitter after work today, and Lyssa and I are going to dig my spare DSL modems out of storage to try them on the line to save ourselves the >= $100us replacement charge for a new DSL modem. Time will tell.
Lyssa's back on - Verizon concurs that it's the modem. More to come.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the Net, someone out there is attacking certain companies and government agencies in the UK with tailored trojan horses via e-mail. There is strong evidence that says that the UK isn't the only target; a number of sites in the US and other countries have also been attacked. No word if the assaults have been successful, logically enough. The trojans were specifically tailored to suspected vulnerabilities in the Windows platform known to be used by those agencies, which could be the sign of an attacker who knows what they want and how to get it, or could be a sign of someone who knows that those agencies use Windows on the desktop and made an educated guess on the versions deployed; a little knowledge of how bureaucracy and IT departments work goes a long way. Like the attacks in Isarael some time ago, the code used was custom written and not released openly on the Net, so the usual scanners and protection packages don't recognise them. This strongly suggests planning. The filenames transmitted are also carefully chosen to sound related to military or corporate business, and not your usual foobar.mp3.scr or startup.pif filenames. These trojans are also designed to snag sensitive documents and send them elsewhere for analysis. They also don't propagate on their own, so they aren't as likely to spread widely enough to be detected.
Man.. after reading Ghost in the Shell and all those Shadowrun novels for all those years, it really makes sense how trojans can be used in attacks now, doesn't it?
Credit card order processing giant CardSystems Solutions was compromised to the tune of 40 million accounts, reports MasterCard, who uses this company to handle their customer transactions. A routine audit shows taht someone compromised CardSystems' network and ran a couple of database queries to capture the names, expiration dates, and identifying numbers of around 68k credit cards. They say that the data used for true identity theft wasn't taken, but having your credit card number and expiration date snaffled is bad enough - people can still charge things to you. Just one more reason to not sleep well at night...
Never, ever, ever store proprietary data on your personal machines without protecting it somehow, if only by not copying it to the hard drive at all. A Japanese power plant employee accidentally leaked 40 megabytes of confidential nuclear power generation reports to the Net using the Winny peer-to-peer file sharing network.
Well, fuck..
I heard from the insurance company: They decided that I was at fault for the wreck on the way to Maryland down from Pennsylvania. They'll cover the cost of repairs, but I don't know how much they'll jack my yearly rates up. I'm afraid to find out.
Oh, and they were angry that I had a rental car for over a month: They'll only cover $20us/day of the costs for reimbursement. The last time I read my policy, I was covered for $30us/day.
They neglected to say if that's what my policy has always been ("We are at war with Oceania; we have always been at war with Oceania" - my ass! I've got the hardcopy to prove it!) or of they've decided to change it so I can't do that to them again in the future.
I needed a car. Insurance covers that. I pay enough to feed a family of six in a famine every year for automobile insurance, you damn well better believe that I'll make the most of what I pay for.
The paperwork is, surprise surprise, in storage.
I've got some phone calls to make tomorrow...
Lyssa didn't have the best day, either. Her DSL connection has been up and down more than a Vegas prostitute on payday, and it's making it very difficult for her to not only apply for loan consolidation (thank you, FedGov, for raising the rates on student loans this summer) but apply for jobs. She's taking it about as well as I am right now.
Verizon managed to hack together some sort of fix that requires her to log into a server to bring the DSL connection up. Of course, I had to jack Luel into the workgroup switch to check my e-mail, and wasn't able to send traffic past the DSL modem (a Westel 2200, which has a lot more functionality built in than I thought (default administrative login: admin/password, though I don't know if it can be logged into from the outside)). If you don't authenticate, you can't send traffic to the Net. I'm jacked into Alphonse right now writing this.
We went to Tiffin tonight for dinner, because frankly neither of us felt like cooking after the days we've had. Much yummy curry was had.
Cryosuspension experiements in dogs for emergency surgery are progressing nicely in my home city of Pittsburgh, PA. Rather than use this technique for daring brain and heart surgeries, they're working on adapting the process of cooling the body down to 7 degrees Centigrade while perfusing it with chilled saline solution for prolonging the lives of accident victims and battlefield casualties.
Wouldn't you know it? All the cool stuff comes out of the woodwork in the Steel City the moment I leave.
Heads-up: At the convention Gallifrey 2006, John Barrowman, who played Captain Jack Harkness in the new Doctor Who series, will be one of the guests.
February 17-19, 2006... not too far away from my birthday...
Silent clubs in the UK, where there is no PA system but everyone instead wears cordless headphones. Wow.
Didn't I see that in a bad sci-fi movie once?
Lyssa and I went to the Safeway Barbecue Battle in downdown DC today. Unfortunately, while I love getting out now and then, it wasn't worth the money we spent on it. The cover charge was $10us, and the food was too expensive for the quality, which was far less than I was expecting, and much less (as if those two terms were qualitative) than I honestly like. It was pushing 90 degrees Farenheit today, which didn't help matters, either. The sunlight felt like it was burning us the moment we stepped outside, and the humidity made it painful to breathe. We took the Metro to DC proper and a short walk brought us to the multi-block barbecue festival. After paying the cover, we wandered around for a time, noting the high price of food at each booth.. depressingly high, in fact. There was also a distinct lack of free samples, which were advertised heavily.
Oh, and you can't just buy something to drink while you're there. You have to buy tickets; each ticket is $2us; drinks start at one ticket each. This is all well and good until you do the math, and discover that a bottle of water is $4-$6us, and a lemon ice is $4us. That's a bit more expensive than either of us were willing to pay for a bottle of water.
The food was overpriced, as I mentioned. We bought a sampler platter of ribs, barbecued chicken, and pulled pork with baked beans and coleslaw for $15us, which is a lot for a single paper plate of food. The turkey leg was $6us, and was actually large enough to be worth the price. The quality of most everything was poor, I'm sorry to say. The pulled pork was pretty good, I have to admit. This was overshadowed, unfortunately, by the ribs that were as much gristle as meat (and not as tasty as they looked) and the chicken, which didn't really taste like anything. The bread was hard as a rock. I couldn't even bite into the turkey leg... I could feel dental work that I've grown attached to wiggling, which is never a good sign.
We ate what we could but pitched the rest, then bought a pair of Italian ices to get us through until we left the competition. We sat by a small park eating Italian ice and watching the world go by around us, with a street musician (who played an amplified and slightly tweaked guitar to a drum machine) seranading us to downtown Washington, DC as a backdrop. A couple of bottles of water got us home in one piece, first by Metro, then by car for the final stretch.
After we got home, we collapsed from exhaustion - the heat and humidity were pretty bad and while Lyssa's used to it, I'm not. After we got back I went back to bed and slept for a good three hours, and woke up still covered with sweat. A quick shower woke me up, though, and Lyssa and I headed out once again, this time to find dinner. My body's still a little swollen (my watch doesn't fit right and I can't put my ring on right now) but a little time and a lot of water will fix that right up... however, the two of us drove to Ledo's Restaurant to pick up pizza.
Ledo's is Maryland's best kept-secret. It's a little hole in the wall Italian restaurant that recently celebrated it's 50th anniversary in Maryland, tucked away in a strip mall about twenty minutes from the University of Maryland. Once we put our orders in we roamed around a bit, visiting a Spanish bakery and a local supermarket for stuff to drink.
Ledo's pizza is good. The crust is thin but tasty, the sauce is sweet, and the toppings are fresh. The pepperoni is cut right from sausage in thick slices and layered right on. The sausage, I've found, doesn't have much flavour. The pineapple is pretty good, but probably from a can, and I completely forgot that I ordered grilled chicken on my pizza. If it's on there...
Ledo's pizza is pretty good. I'm told that either you like it or you don't. I suggest taking a drive down to route 193 east and looking for it's rather plain lighted sign on the left-hand side of the highway.
Let's see.. what else was I going to write about?
Oh, yeah.. Walking the Thresholds... I left off with the Naked Elf Cuddle Tent Friday night...
Saturday morning we woke up wondering just how much sleep we'd gotten, because without timepieces we swiftly returned to the schedules our bodies are hardwired to operate on. We wandered down to the picnic tables to listen to the Toxic Elf talk.. and talk.. and talk..
I decided that just keeping my mouth shut until the showers were started up made the most sense. Eventually, we wandered down to the showers and got cleaned up, then pieced together lunch. I sat in on a reiki presentation by Rialian and Jarin, and then Silvaerin'a's discussion of physics and metaphysics, from Newton through alchemy into as much quantum mechanics as you can go into in three hours.. I wound up hanging around talking with her about that until the time came to hike back up the hill to the stone circle for the in-between life meditation by A'hri'l, which wound up being a lot more involved and a lot more rough than I'd thought it would be.
I don't know how much detail I want to go into about this. Suffice it to say that it was a lot more rough than I thought it was going to be. It took a while to calm down after I came out of the trance, and after I made it back to the campsite I slept for a few hours out of sheer exhaustion.
My body's getting old. It doesn't bounce back the way it used to.
I made it back online in time for the presentation that Lyssa, Kash, and I were doing, which was a roundtable discussion of technology, cybernetics, and mythology as they relate to metaphysics. We lost a few folks, but had a lot more walk-ups (heh) who participated in the discussion which went on for a few more hours than originally scheduled. Even after the discussion ended, it kept going even longer informally.
Somehow we even touched on the topic of numbers stations, firewalls, sigil magick, and finding new uses for existing technologies.
Yes, I finally had a chance to explain my theories of technomagick. I love talking shop.
After that was lunch, at which time it started raining, as it had been doing off an on the whole weekend, just in time for Rialian's discussion of what he calls the relational path. The interrelationships of the various elements of day to day life are what he talked about, and how changes propagate from part to part, place to place, and thing to thing. I have to hand it to Rialian, he really knows his stuff.. he's got a lot of time to read, and he juggles at least eight books at a time. He brought most of them with him to Thresholds, and they made their rounds not a few times. Suffice it to say that I keep my eye on a lot of that stuff already, as my memory logs can attest to.
Afterward, Lyssa and I made dinner for everyone, in the form of vegetarian chili and polenta in the Four Quarters Farm kitchens.
I'm rather pleased to say that they turned out quite well - everyone that took part enjoyed what we'd made.
I never made chili with potatoes before, but it went over quite well just the same.
After that was the mead-making rite, where people brought honey and herbs with them from home. I brought a half-litre of clover honey that Blackcat gave to me for Yule a few years ago; Lyssa brought some of the herbs she's been growing, some pineapple/basil and chocolate/mint hybrids to contribute. On and on, the procession of honeys went into the pot to cook and eventually decant into a number of carboys.
Rialian brews fantastic mead. I can't wait to see how it turns out. It'll need at least a year to age, and a few more to really come into its own.
After that was more about reiki, and attunements courtesy of Rialian and Jarin. I've been interested in reiki as a discipline for a while now, but have not been able to attend any of the attunements in Pittsbugh (those I could afford, anyway). Rialian and Jarin have been not only practising but experimenting with reiki for years, and while their conclusions are very different, they both have some interesting things to say.
One of the things that concerns me about reiki is the alterations that I've made to this body over the years. Reiki, once it's implanted in one's bio-enegetic system, cleans things out and patches up any injuries that have happened over the years.. what if it un-did some of the things I put in there?
Rialian says that it shouldn't remove anything that I put in there, much to my relief. If anything, it takes what it has to work with and fine-tunes it as best it can. "So if you're an asshole," he remarked, "it'll make you the best asshole that you can be."
Lovely. Interesting, though.
There's also the matter of being incapacitated while reiki's cleaning you out. Everyone reacts differently after an attunement, in my observation. I've seen people trip from it for hours afterward, and people trip all over themselves for the bathroom beause their digestive systems decided to empty as fast as they possibly could. I've also seen people knocked flat because their body's respiratory systems decided to clean themselves out explosively. Another worry of mine was that I might not be in shape to drive home after camp broke the next day.
I think it's going to have to wait until after I get settled in at my new apartment in a few weeks' time.
After that, Lyssa and I hung out at the bardic circle, at the top of the campsite, kicked off by Rick. If you've never been to one, there's usually a bonfire built in the center, and people walk up and tell jokes, tell stories, and from time to time sing, recite a poem, or play some music. That night was made up of a small number of jokes and a lot of stories, some very well told (those by Lyssa and Rick) and some that were less than entertaining (my own, for example). What's important, though, is that people got up there and gave it a shot. To my knowledge, nobody got booed out of the circle.
We crashed not long after the fire began to die down, and woke up in time to break camp. Breaking the tent tdown took longer than expected, due to a roommate that we didn't know we had. Remember that wolf spider? It had taken up residence behind a joint in one of the rods and spun itself an egg sack, which it was grasping tightly between its eight legs. Mika managed to dislodge the spider but it lost the egg sack in the process, and I don't know if it ever found it again; we were too busy throwing stuff out and packing up our gear. We wound up leaving the ground tarp because there wasn't any room in the car for it, nor room to unroll it and let it dry.
Lauren and Steve took a lot of our gear with them; unfortunately, I haven't been able to let the tent properly air out, and I'm worried that it's begun to grow moldy while in storage. I need to get together with them to pick it up, but I don't know if there'll be any way air it out until after the move.
Exhausted, Lyssa, Mika, and I said our good-byes and left for home. We offloaded a lot of our stuff and drove to Outback for our first good, hot meal in the entire weekend.
After that, Lyssa and I drove back to Pittsburgh to pack my stuff up; that's a story for another time, though.
Jonathan Adams, ex-Bond bad guy and narrator of The Rocky Horror Picture Show>, has passed beyond. Lost in space, and lost in time, and meaning...
Things you'll never hear a pagan say.
Just when you thought it was safe to purchase real estate in a time where your parents' homestead, roughly the size of a townhouse, can fetch upwards of $100kus, the Supreme Court ruled that local governments can annex private property for economic development. What does this mean? If Wal-Mart decides that it wants to build a new franchise and your house just happens to be in the way, they can ask the local government where you live for your land, and it can be handed over to Wal-Mart.
The original owners, incidentally, are screwed when this happens.
The ruling was a close one, 5-4 in favour of the bill. The first people hit by this bill live in Connecticut, thrown out of house and home so that an office block can be constructed. Local officials have carefully been granted this power, and the high courts have been divested of any say in the matter (for the time being; you know this is going to cause one hell of a backlash).
First Dance Dance Revolution took the arcades by storm. Then it was parodied in the form of Mosh Mosh Revolution in the webcomic Megatokyo. Now there's Kick Ass Kung-fu, an immersive video game where your real-life martial arts skills control your character in the game environment. The game engine apparently implements video game-style physics for the character, so even if you have trouble skipping rope your virtual self can give the cast of The Matrix a few lessons. Special collision and impact analysis software determines how effective your attacks and blocks are during the course of the game, computing virtual damage.
Second day of work: Still got there early (by a near-accident I woke up almost fifteen minutes late) - arrived around 0730 EDT. Next try: Get up at 0600 on Monday. Still getting my work environment in shape.
I discovered something today about the newer Dell systems that have a built in video subsystem, as well as an add-on card: The BIOSes work in either-or fashion, i.e., either the on-board video adaptor is active or the extra one is, but not both. I spent a couple of hours today trying to get multiheadedness in X running, but only managed to get two out of three displays running, after installing Nvidia's closed-source drivers. I still can't get the on-board chipset running, so I've decided to use the third monitor for Luel, my laptop.
Oh, well. I'd really like to see the glmatrix module of xscreensaver in three screens simultaneously.
I'm really enjoying working at Sunrocket. The people are nice as well as clueful, and always fun to talk to. Stuff gets done and, so far, there isn't much downtime, as evidenced as my lack of time to write lately. There is even new hardware to play with... I can't wait. I haven't been excited about working anyplace in a long, long time.
I've got some time, so I'll start in with Walking the Thresholds, the camping trip Lyssa and I went on earlier in June. This is long, and it's only going to get longer, because I'm not even all the way through Friday, so sit tight.
Walking the Thresholds is a camping trip held every summer at the Four Quarters Farm, which, if you've never been there before, is out in the middle of nowhere. Well off the main highway, you've got a good hour's drive to get there. I know it doesn't sound like much to some of you, but I found it a very moving experience - this summer was the first time I've been so far off the grid that I couldn't even feel any RF, let alone get a signal on my phone. The sky was the clearest I've ever seen, so much so that I could count individual stars in the sky and the air was fresh and clean.
I drove down on Thursday from Washington, DC (I'd gone to visit Lyssa the night before, and brought a load of stuff down for the moving effort) and after a quick supply run (I didn't bring a lot of consumables with me to save room in the car for packed-up stuff) after a late start, and of course getting caught in rush hour traffic on the beltway, which turned a quick jaunt back over the border into Pennsylvania into a five hour trip.
The first thing I noticed was the lack of pavement on the road heading back into the Farm proper, as evidenced by my rental car. The second thing I noticed was the presence of animals roaming around everywhere. Turtles picking their way across the road; chickens wandering around with peeps near the farmhouse; frogs hopping through the mud and grass.
Yes, I'm a city-thing. Seeing these things touched me in a way that few things have. The most contact with critters I have is watching birds when I get out of the car, and the odd pet cat or dog met in my travels. Sure, everything is alive to some extent, but this was the first real living place that I've ever been in. You can feel it all around you, buzzing just below the range of hearing, singing a hymn to a place that most everyone takes for granted.
A few folks were already set up by the time I got there; Camp Cambodia was in full swing, and Rialian and Helen were getting things ready for the influx of folks to come. I was offered one of the wooden platforms scattered around the campsite to set my tent up on, but declined because... I don't know why. Part of me wondered what would have to be given up for it, and part of me was expecting to have to break down and move everything because someone else would want it. I set up the tent on a reasonably flat section of land (to appearances, as I'll explain later) near the main path through the farm, an operation which took less than five minutes after unfolding the ground tarp to protect it from the wet soil and critters. The tent I'd purchased is constructed after the fashion of an umbrella, so once it was unfolded I only had to push upward on the center part and the tent assembled itself. The rain fly was tossed over top of the tent's shell and everything was assembled in a flash. Rialian was impressed, and is probably planning to pick up one of his own for next year.
Rick and Kash helped me get everything staked down, and then I started hauling stuff from my rental car down to the campsite. Tessa from Camp Cambodia was kind enough to help me with some of the heavier stuff, like the inflatable mattress and a crate of stuff that, in hindsight, I really didn't need and certainly did't make use of. The pump for the mattress was already charged, and after unrolling it I turned it loose.
The air mattress wound up being a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be. It took up almost the entire tent, in fact, and was much higher than expected also, which made it difficult to stand upright on top of that (figuratively speaking). Folks walking by were impressed by the seeming luxury (I use 'seeming' deliberately, here) of my setup, as well as it appearing a bit bigger on the inside than on the outside. Sizes can be decieving, after all.
Rialian's opening thingy (so-called because 'ritual' suggests planning and organisation) went remarkably smoothly. The theme this year was community and what people bring with them to the places they inhabit.
I noticed something odd during the course of WtT this year: Rialian's closing words were in vernacular English, or at least that's what I heard. Over the next few days, I overheard folks wondering what language he'd been speaking, or wondering how Rialian knew French/German. At least two other folks mentioned Listari. I still haven't figured out what was going on. The gist of what he said was about welcoming everyone to a place of safety, where they did not have to worry about the outside world for a time.
Not long after that, I snuck back to the stone circle to take care of a little business. Since Thresholds is a good place for changes to be made, and it's a reasonably secure area for folks like myself, I took the opportunity to rid myself of a little excess baggage, namely the 'damaged goods' crap that's built up over the past eleven years or so, since I arrived here. I charged up one of my ofuda, one of the final ones in my supply (more due to my not buying more flash paper than anything else), loaded the whole mess into it, and then set it loose with my lighter.
Have you ever had to carry around thirty pounds of gear that you never use, but can't bring yourself to leave behind until you get good and tired of wasting all that energy lugging it about? How your muscles ache and you start to regret coming, and regret making the mistake of hauling more stuff than you really need? Then you leave it behind and walk on? It feels like that.
I wandered around a little to see who was already there and then eventually found my way up to Cambodia's party camp (they set up two this year; one for partying and one for the folks who actually wanted to sleep). I eventually broke into a conversation or two there and relaxed with a bottle or two of the mead that was making its way around the particular campfire I was sitting at. Dinner wasn't much, a couple of pop tarts and a few handfuls of trail mix that I'd brought with me (because I hadn't felt like setting up the camp stove or figured out how the kitchen arrangements worked yet). I wound up running into a few friends of Bladeless Axe who I'd first met a number of years ago at Defcon.
There seems to be an unusual overlap of Others and hackers, at least in the circles I run in. This still surprises me.
I awoke on Friday morning to... sunrise and mist. Lots of mist. My body's internal chronometer decided to ignore its programming and run from firmware only (i.e., the schedule that it was programmed genetically with, and not the programming that I've set into it over the years). I think I got about four hours of of sleep that first night, due to the humidity and temperature (WtT is usually on the cold side), adjusting to sleeping on an air mattress set up on a slant, and the large spider (by large, I mean two inches, confirmed later that weekend while breaking camp) that took up residence between the tentfly and tent shell, right above the lantern hanging from the ceiling.
Keep an eye on that spider; I'll mention it time and again. Spiders were all over the place in a synchronistic manner that weekend.
Believe you me, I did. <shiver>
My brain came back online fairly rapidly, even though I'm not used to being entirely unplugged. I met up with Solo of the Lost Boys and Chris for breakfast, and decided to fire up the Grasshopper stove that my grandfather gave me for the trip to make breakfast. It heated up water just fine; it was the loss of balance on the stone table and fall to the ground that nearly splashed us with boiling water that soured me on it for the rest of the weekend. As I munched on raisins and more trail mix Solo produced from his tent a crate of ramen bowls from Japan - the good ones, with their own foam bowls, a large cake of peppered tofu, and noodles that weren't nasty, even after rehydration. The large camp stove set up in the 'living room' tent near the edge of the campsite provided both coffee for me and hot water for our ramen. Much of the day was spent sitting around geeking with people and attending the odd seminar. The extended peception class was most interesting; I did learn a few new techniques that I simply haven't had the time to practise, but hope to start soon. The sight was... I can't say it was entirely new, because a lot of it I have naturally, though I did pick up on a couple of things that I hadn't seen before (like the glyphs on the tree I was examining - did someone leave them there ahead of time?). I'm also not used to seeing things without something approximating electronic reproduction, a cast which my particular modifications lend everything. The attempts at telepathy near the end of the class, unfortunately, only reminded me that I probably don't have the talent for it. I also had the opportunity to take a dip in the swimming hole downhill from the campsite for the first (and unfortunately the last) time that weekend with Rick and another young woman whose name I now forget.
Dinner was more pop tarts and trail mix. Someone had made dinner that night, but I missed it entirely because, well, I was talking to people the whole time. I did a lot of that, much more than at any other time in life.
WtT is one of the most relaxing events I've ever been to.
I started to worry as sun set - where were Lyssa, Mika, Lauren, and Steve? They were supposed to arrive sometime that afternoon but were hours overdue.
They did arrive that night, though much later than expected. It was actually around the time that Solo broke out his sun gun (a directional lantern that pumps out at least 500k candlea of light, and was spotted clear across the farm). It was also used to test the density of the mist in the air (there was a ceiling of about thirty feet above the ground that evening, as estimated by the distance between said miniature star-with-a-handle and the circle of light cast upon the layer of fog in the sky).
At one point while I was playing with the miniature star-with-a-handle, Rhianna walked by and asked if I was trying to make contact with aliens using the beam of light I was shining into the sky. "I'm just trying to find a ride home," I answered.
You've got a deal, Rhianna - the first one to get a ride brings the other.
I may not have gotten a ride home, but at last the headlights heading down the road belonged to Lyssa and company. I helped them offload their gear from the car and once everything was moved into our tent, Lauren and Steve began setting up easily the biggest tent in the campsite, soon dubbed the Tent Mahal. Easily twenty feet long by ten long, ten people with all of their gear could easily have fit into it with some elbow room to spare. The evening was spent trying to coax a campfire to life in the Lost Boys' camp and kicking back a little.
Following some time spent at the Lost Boys' camp trying to keep the fire going and sharing a couple, Lyssa, myself, and a few good friends retired to our tent to make use of the one of the rules of the Four Quarters Farm that I never thought I'd ever partake of, the clothing-optional rule.
This is why I didn't take any photographs, incidentally.
Take one TARDIS-like tent with air mattress, add a handful of Others who were lounging around in various states of undress (from nude to no shoes) chatting and cuddling until near sunrise. I lost track of how long we stayed up but had a wonderful time. Clothes are such odd things... either you need to wear the right ones to have a good time or you have to be getting it on to enjoy (or justify) being naked, right?
Wrong.
I love meeting folks who think the same way. 'Naked' and 'physical contact' do not imply sex, as much as we're conditioned to think that way.
Come Saturday morning, everyone who was going to be there had arrived, and Thresholds began in earnest. We all awoke and stumbled out of the tent, confused once more as to what time it was, and indeed what day it happened to be.
More to come in the future, including catching a glimpse of things to come, an utter meltdown, helping make dinner for folks, learning more about reiki, and the bardic circle.
Life is up, life is down, life has left me wanting to cry.
Today was my first day of work. Of course, I wanted to be there early, and not caught in rush hour traffic on the beltway, so I got up at the crack of dawn (0515 EDT), got dressed, and after throwing lunch together hit the road.. and got lost in traffic, necessitating a turn-around way on the other side of the University of Maryland. I eventually got straightened out and started fighting my way down the beltway in the general direction of Virginia. I made it to the office in record time, a litte over an hour.. over an hour ahead of schedule.
Once again, at 0800 EDT, I'm the first one at the office. I wound up killing time reading my health insurance paperwork and later on my PHP book (why don't I just buy stock in O'Reilly and be done with it?) until a pleasant soul let me in to kill time at the office until everyone arrived, at which time I went on a whirlwind tour of the office meeting my new co-workers.
I'm still getting set up at work. I still have to get my workstation set up, and of course I need to learn my way around the various networks and figure out what everything does. That'll take a little time, of course.
The insurance company is climbing all over me for more statements pertaining to the wreck I was in a few days ago (I'll write about all of this soon.. if only for my own sanity, which is a little threadbare at the moment). I find it interesting how writing in here is good for me, as it helps me organise my thoughts and put them down in a coherent format; as within, so without, as the old adage goes.
Rush hour traffic in the other direction, however, is the pits. It took two hours to drive home tonight (left the office at 1715 EDT, fifteen minute stop off at the supermarket for a few things for dinner).
I think a little tweaking of my travel schedule is in order.
Let's see.. Walking the Thresholds (the camping trip I went on a few weeks ago).. everything that happened then.. driving back to Pittsburgh to pack up to move.. the move itself.. getting my TARDIS... getting in a car crash not two days after getting TARDIS.. trip to downtown DC on Tuesday and getting horribly ripped off on dinner.. trip to the movies to see Batman Begins and another rip-off dinner... open study last night.. doing my finances tonight and feeling my hearts leap into my throat as I discovered that I only have $400us available at this moment...
Interesting times, indeed.
Still alive. Back online. The Children were, after a lot of fighting, reconnected at Elwing's house. Lots and lots going on, maybe I'll have time to write tonight.
The DNS updates have finally propagated through the Net, so even though the reconnection took place on Monday, it finally means something.
Privately produced television shows are dangerous. We can't have them, can we?
Yes, I'm still alive. I'm back in Pittsburgh and running around like a madman trying to get everything done. I'll write about everything once I have a few hours, but to give everyone a short overview of developments in my life, I spent the weekend at a gather called Walking the Thresholds, I've been hauling boxes of my stuff down to Maryland a few at a time, I bought the first car of my very own this afternoon, and two good friends of mine, Hasufin and Kash, are in Pittsburgh helping Lyssa (she's here, too) and I move my stuff down to Maryland. That's the capsule version; I'll flesh it out later.
Back from Walking the Thresholds. Recovering from six hours of REM sleep the whole time. Lots of stuff to come.
What. The. Fuck. GOP chairman walks out of raucous hearing. During a hearing related to tha USA PATRIOT Act and the expiry of certain portions therof, all hell broke loose and the chairman just up and walked out.
These are the people we have in the US government these days??
Last day at medSage.
Last night Alexius came over to help me pack some stuff up at my apartment, and after the first crate of videotapes we went out for coffee at a local shop to catch up on things and relax for a while. I've been away for a long time, and we've been out of touch. A lot's happening right now for both of us, and it's happening pretty fast.
It's a rare time when you can just sit back and spend some time with a good friend. That's what makes life worth living.
Look to the skies, but be sure that you have an umbrella handy. A severed leg plummetted from the sky and landed in the back yard of a Long Island, New York homeowner yesterday. The leg (leg, hip joint, and even part of the torso) apparantly fell from the wheel-well of a South African Airways jetliner en route; this has been confirmed by US Customs agents, who found what was left of the hapless stowaway when the plane landed at Kennedy International Airport.
In the heart of the state of Alabama, a woman has given birth to a baby after the successful transplantation of ovarian tissue from her identical twin. One Stephanie Yarber underwent the experimental procedure last year, surprisingly began to menstruate after just three months. Two months after that, she became pregnant.
Life finds a way. It always does.
Just as it manages to find a way to survive the most lethal medicinal compounds that the human race can synthesise. There's a new strain of the tuberculosis bacterium out there and it's resistant to numerous drugs used today. The strain, dubbed MDR-TB (multiple drug resistant tuberculosis), is most commonly found in the immigrant population of California, but it's a sure bet that it'll slowly begin to spread as people move around and the bacterium jumps to new hosts. The treatment for this particular strain is extremely expensive (>= $200kus of drugs, often up around $1mus), requiring a regimen of bleeding edge antibiotics for up to two continuous years. The evidence presented by the Journal of the American Medical Association strongly suggests that this is the result of folks overseas not completing an anti-tuberculosis vaccination regimen, which logically has a way of killing off all of the weaker bacteria and leaving only the real microbial badasses, which are then free to reproduce normally, following the principles of Darwinian evolution.
It should be noted that you can't really 'eradicate' a disease. Bacteria and viruses will always be in the environment. When they say that a disease has been eradicated, they really mean that everyone that could possibly catch it has been vaccinated for it, which means that there are no longer any hosts for the organisms. It amounts to the same thing, but the difference is an important one.
This makes me wonder: A lot of folks have presented evidence that this is a hoax, an art hack (no MARC logo or branding, for example), but then again look at some of the crazy stuff that's come out of the DHS.
My hope is that it's an art hack.
R.U.Sirius, formerly of the magazine Mondo 2000 is back, this time with podcasts.
And they let this guy into the country?!?!
Thanks, Seele: USB pendrives shaped like sushi.
I've come to a conclusion about Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania): If he doesn't want to listen, his mind is already made up, or if he doesn't want to deal with you, his responses to any telephone calls made or letters recieved is simply an explanaton of whatever it is that you're writing about. Nowhere in those communique's is there any reason on his part for disagreeing with you, any comments aside from the politically correct ones, or any reason to believe that he's actually read anything sent to him.
We've got to vote this guy out of office.
Another evening, another shopping trip to pick up packing boxes and stuff for the camping trip. After a quick test of the camp stove, I discovered that it does indeed work, and it can be used for cooking without too much difficulty. I need to get another tarp, just to be safe, but I don't really expect much difficulty at this point in time.
Last night was used to catch up on everything, to put it simply. Balance the chequebook, clean out the fridge and the cabinets.. stuff like that. Stuff that gets put off. The fishtank was also topped off. I think I'm going to use my nalgene bottles to transport Proteus and Eris to Virginia in the future. No idea about the Sea Monkeys yet.
I have no idea what possessed Apple to do this, but it's official (as official as any press release on a corporate web site, anyway) - starting in 2006, Apple Computers will move away from IBM's PowerPC architecture in favour of the Intel CPU platform. The leap was announced at the World Wide Developer's Conference in San Francisco, CA yesterday morning. At Steve Jobs' keynote address, he demonstrated a port of the Tiger release of Mac OSX running on a prototype Macintosh computer based around an Intel processor core (a 3.8GHz Pentium-4 based machine - thanks, Lowmagnet). Apple is selling a Developer Transition Kit for $999us to assist coders in migrating their code from the PowerPC architecture to the Intel architecture.
Speculation's running rampant over why this is happening. Historically, there have only been two hardware platforms for personal computers, Intel and whatever the Mac had been running at the time (at first the Motorola 68k series, lately the PowerPC by IBM). Both platforms have many differences at all levels, the least of which is instruction efficiency. PowerPC processors run at a slower clock speed than Intel's cores do, but they're more efficient, so they tend to benchmark nearly the same (if you believe all of the benchmarks, that is). That's the most visible difference to non-developers, though - there are changes that end users will never notice, but coders will tear their hair out over, such as differences in how bytes are represented (in the Intel cores, the bit that represents the '1' in the string of '1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,... are stored closest to the base of memory (little-endian), while in PowerPC cores it comes closer to the top of the memory field, address-wise (called big-endian)). Unimportant unless you write code that goes down there and flips single bits in bytes, one at a time. If you're so inclined, you can read an excellent overview of the endian-ness schtick here, but take my word for it: When it comes to architecture, everything that you can't see will come back to shoot you in the head. Just as interesting, it's come out that Apple's been planning this move for about five years now.
Maybe it's become too difficult for third-party developers to maintain code for two separate hardware platforms. Maybe IBM's thinking about killing off the PowerPC line. Maybe Apple's decided to jump on the x86 bandwagon because that is what everyone else is using. I don't know for sure.
(updated - thanks for the information, Lowmagnet)
Even though the United States Supreme Court has decreed that people who smoke marijuana for medical purposes (i.e., with the prescription of a doctor) are still violating the draconian US anti-drug laws, the medical marijuana clubs in California are still in business. Eyebrows are raised and people are looking over their shoulders more than they had been before, but that hasn't stopped cancer patients, AIDS sufferers, and people with chronic pain related to injuries from going to one of the dispensaries in a number of states for a brownie or a few hits from a water pipe for relief. Interestingly enough, the Supreme Court ruling doesn't strike down any of the pro-medicinal marijuana laws in place, it only says that they are in violation of federal law, i.e., they're not trying to do anything about it, at least nothing's given them a reason to try to do anything about it. The Governator, of course, refuses to take a stand at all, passing the buck on to Congress.
Your assignment for the day is to do some research on medical marijuana. Run a few searches. Read the medical studies. Make up your own mind.
As always, your personal information is safe and sound.. unless the backup tapes are lost in the mail. Citigroup has lost the records of 3.9 million Americans in what could be considered the largest breach of confidentiality yet reported. The backup tapes were shipped via UPS some time ago to a credit bureau in Texas, and they vanished en route. They do not believe that the information has been used inappropriately, but they are still sending out letters of warning.
Please tell me that they're encrypting their backups...
Debian Linux v3.1 is now officially released.. on 14 CD-ROMs or two DVD-ROMs. Wow.
The Los Alamos National Laboratories have been under the proverbial microscope for a number of years now for various screwups, among them loss of confidential research information (of the sort that tends to tens of millions on the black market) and financial irregularities of the sort that can be considered embezzlement. One Tommy Hook, one of the auditors looking into the embezzlement case, however, was attacked while out of the office early Sunday morning by persons unknown. Both Hook and one Chuck Montano were scheduled to present evidence to the House Energy and Oversight Committee, which began the investigation. Hook's jaw is broken and one of the discs in his back was injured during the fight. If the folks who jumped him were trying to get him to back down, they made a mistake, because now the FBI has been added to the investigation.
Just when you thought four-foot remixes in dual-pad mode were getting easy.. Dance Dance Immolation comes along!
I see that respect and compassion aren't family values to teach. (note: not work safe quotes)
What a weekend.
After work on Friday I spent some time straightening up my apartment, which had begun to look pretty dodgy in places.. no, maybe 'cluttered' or 'a mess' would be more appropriate terms. Some digging and folding revealed to me once more the floor of my bedroom, which I hadn't seen in roughly one week's time. That done, I set about packing a few more boxes of stuff from the living room, mostly books but some knick-knacks from the shelves and home entertainment center as well as my room. Rhianna was supposed to stop in Pittsburgh briefly on her way back down from Canada, but due to unforseen circumstances, she'd gotten a late start and it wouldn't have been feasible to meet up to haul some of my gear. Around 1800 EDT, I loaded a couple of (very heavy) crates of books into my car (I could only fit three in the rental car, unfortunately, two in the trunk and a third in the back seat) and headed southward, in the general direction of Washington, DC.
Five hours later, I pulled up outside of Lyssa's apartment and headed inside. We managed to manhandle the three crates of books out of my car and into the apartment, an experience which both of us hope to avoid in the future because I optimised for space in the boxes (I filled them as full as I possibly could to minimise the number of crates necessary) and not for mass (those suckers are heavy). Hands shaking and backs sore, we took off for Plato's Diner for a late dinner and then returned to her apartment to watch a little television and then crash for the night.
We woke up sometime during the later half of Saturday morning, got cleaned up, and made a hasty breakfast before hitting the road to pick up Kash, who would be our moral support while we drove around the Virginia/Maryland/DC area checking out apartments. Our first stop was a community called the Forest, named for the elegantly landscaped grounds and the thick forest that surrounded the area, giving it a quiet, homey feel. The apartments there were well within my budget, but the commute to Sunrocket would be, on average, one and one half hours. I can't manage that, I'm sorry. We did get to see a number of suites there, but the wide open spaces and high livability of the apartments wasn't enough to coax me to put up with sleep deprivation and three hours every day on the beltway. What good is a nice apartment if you never get to enjoy it?
The second apartment complex is in a far more urban area than the Forest, in the northern part of Virginia and only about ten minutes off from the Sunrocket offices. The suites are very large and very bright - between the balcony and the picture windows, we won't be hurting for a nice view or a lot of light in the afternoon. Net.access is included, but it's through Cox, so it's doubtful if it'll be usable for the Network. I will contact Speakeasy shortly to find out. Needless to say, after touring the model apartments, we signed on the dotten line for a two bedroom, one bathroom apartment with a study on the side. Total rent: $1290us/month, which isn't bad at all for an apartment that size in northern Virginia. The complex is also about ten minutes off of the Metro station, so mass transmit is also readily available.
The Metro puts PAT in Pittsburgh to shame. The Metro lines can actually get you to where you want to go, and not just from the heart of the city to the southern edge of the city.
After putting the deposit on the apartment (which we can start moving into on 8 July 2005), Lyssa, Kash, and I headed to Uno's for dinner to celebrate. Neither Lyssa nor I had a good breakfast that day, so we were famished by the time we finally decided on a restaurant to eat at. Kash had a little trouble finding something to eat due to his food allergies but we did find a few things that would work, and then we spent the afternoon talking and squeeing about the new apartment.
It hasn't quite sunk in yet. So far, the logistics of moving all of my gear to another state for storage and then another move into the apartment have settled in on me, but that's about it.
Afterward, we headed back to Lyssa's apartment to clean up and get ready for the get-together that night - Lyssa had put out an all-call for folks going on the camping trip this week, and we needed to get the place straightened up and room made for guests. Kash, for various reasons, is exempt from moving heavy stuff around, so Lyssa cleaned up the bathroom and kitchen while I straightened up the living space and made room for people. Rhianna and Rick, safe from their trip from Canada arrived with Solo of the Lost Boys in tow, followed by Rialian and Helen with a few more folks, whose names I regrettably forget. The first movie of the night was Team America: World Police, from the demented imaginations of Trey Parker and Matt Stone (of South Park fame).
This movie is painful, no two ways about it. South Park fans will no doubt eat it up at the same time they're cringing in pain. It spoofs the marionette shows of the sixties and seventies beautifully (remember Thunderbirds?) and it's plain to see that they don't think much of the US geopolitical stance, either.
There's also hot puppet sex, which must be seen to be believed.
Solo and I ran out for alcohol while everyone else waited for the pizza to arrive, which saved us from the mindfuck that is called FLCL. When we returned, we found Rialian staring slack-jawed at the television, futilely trying to make sense of the show.
For what I think is the first time ever, Rialian crashed. The earth tremor you may have felt was the last of his sanity going critical.
Lyssa and I finally crashed around 0230 EDT, after everyone had left and we had picked up the last of the trash from the night's rather successful gather.
The next day we slept in until noon or so, though we actually woke up around eleven and started talking about the move. We lounged around for a while until eventually deciding to get up, get showed, and go to breakfast. We wound up going out for lunch at Tiffin's, the very same Indian restaurant whose chicken vindaloo had kicked my ass so soundly a few months ago, for their Sunday lunch buffet. My original rating stands: One flaregun. Damn fine food, good service, and good, hot coffee.
After heading home, we caught the latest episode of the new Doctor Who series (when are you guys going to pick it up in the US, anyway?) and then, all too soon, I had to head for home for more packing.
Disney does goatse? (note: work safe)
Everything I need to know in life I learned from first-person shooters.
I found out last night what's been up at home. I'll start at the beginning.
Last night was a long one. After dinner I headed to Sam's Club to pick up a six pack of strapping tape and another round of packing boxes for the move, coming up in a few weeks. They were out of shipping boxes so I wound up buying a package of file boxes, which aren't nearly as large but have built in handles and don't have to be taped shut (well, very often, anyway); they're ideal for little stuff, like papers, models (with sufficient padding) and knick-knacks. My next stop was the homefront to see the folks and pick up the paperwork for the insurance company. As it turned out, the paperwork was already done and ready to send back - thanks, guys.
Dataline's been under a doctor's care since she was rushed to the hospital a few weeks ago. The diagnoses are in: Type 2 diabetes, hypothyroidism, hypertension, and an enlarged liver. In hindsight (which is 20/20, as we all know), this makes perfect sense. Dataline's now on a special diet to manage her blood glucose (it's unknown at this time if she'll have to begin taking insulin) and taking one of the newer sythetic thyroxin analogues. She's also on something for her blood pressure, though I don't recall off the top of my head what it is; they are doctor's office samples to see how well this particular protocol works before committing to a (very, very expensive) prescription.
I can't believe that I forgot. Type 2 diabetes runs in my bloodline. My biological grandmother had it near the end of her life, and I have some blood relatives who are also diabetic at this time.
After leaving the homestead I drove out to John and Lara's new apartment (a top shelf flat, to be sure) to pick up some gear that Hasufin had loaned to them a while ago, and wound up hanging out and talking with them about the impending move. I'm worried about them - my grandfather is old, even venerable, I dare say. He's had a long life, and done things that I can only dream of. He's earned the downtime in his life. Dataline is also getting up in years; it may be disrespectful, but it's a fact of life.
None of us are getting any younger. Even me. It's a fact of Time that we barter the moments of our existence with our health, second by second, day by day. Eventually, we can't pay for our time anymore and our bodies fail, and we go off to wherever it is that people go.
My grandfather has some amount of time left; I don't know how much.
Dataline has more time left; again, I don't know how much. When my grandfather goes, it's going to hit her like nothing else has. It's going to hit all of us.
As the kids these days say, it's going to suck.
I'm leaving Pittsburgh soon, leaving Dataline behind with my grandfather. As much as I want to continue carving my way through history, and maybe making things better for some people... it's going to hurt them a little now, and a great deal later. I can't see it clearly, but it's coming; I don't need the Sight to know that. Should I stay in Pittsburgh, where I'll be needed in the future? I don't know.
I'm everywhere. It's one of those things that I just know, that I can't escape. If I leave Pittsburgh, I'm can always go back when I'm needed.
It won't help protect kids, it'll only tell them where to go first: ICANN has approved the .xxx top-level domain. A company called ICM Registry, Inc., based out of Great Britain, will have control over registration of these domains. When I find out how much they'll be asking for yearly registrations (this hasn't been decided upon yet) I'll let everyone know. I, for one, wouldn't mind having a .xxx vanity domain of my own.
Heh. http://www.goatse.xxx/
You know it's going to happen.
I thought this had already happened: Microsoft announced that they will start using "Open XML" file formats for Office starting somewhen in 2006. Their file formats will be available under a royalty-free software license shortly before Office v12 is released; if I recall their marketing tripe correctly, this was a big selling point of Office 2003, wasn't it (not that the formats are really free, though). Just like right now, all they have to do is sit on the DTDs (XML Document Type Definitions), which means that the values of each document have no context, so you really won't know what everything means in there. They can also use a proprietary data compression scheme, so opening up the XML file won't be easy for third parties, to say the least.
What with the FBI being able to go to libraries and confiscate records of all the books you take out without anyone being in a position to talk about it, anonymity is all the rage when it comes to your reading list. This, however, smacks of a set up, if only a set up of your wallet. I'm all for privacy and anonymity, but I have a problem with buying an anonymous library card. The cash transaction still gets tracked - "someone bought one of our anonymous cards, and here's the number attached to it." It would also be a great way to gouge people for a little peace of mind.
I wonder if that'll catch on.
There may have been a breakthrough in the murder of Dr. Eugene Mallove, a scientist researching different forms of electricity generation and one of the researchers who attempted peer-review of the so-called 'cold fusion' experiemnts of the late 1980's. One Gary McAvoy, already serving a sentence for larceny, has been implicated in the 2004 murder of Dr. Mallove. The article is thin on details; it is not, for example, mentioned if this took place before or after McAvoy's arrest for larceny, or even what lead them to McAvoy as the primary suspect in the murder. Details to come.
Well, it's finally sunk in. I'm leaving in a couple of weeks, going off to continue making my way through the world.
I don't have a living room anymore, it's packed full of crates of books and knick-knacks. I can't find my altar anymore, and let me tell you, the air conditioner isn't easy to to reach anymore, either. I need to find some way of packing up all of the stuff on top of the home entertainment center, too. The Major and the Sentinel will have to break off the tentacle lovin' for a while (I never did post pictures of that, did I...?) to be packed up in bubble wrap and crates. And the stuff in my bedroom. And the stuff in the closet that I never did set out. Maybe I should get some clingwrap to hold shut the decorative trunks that I have a lot of my models in, too..."
I need to plan this better, I think. First thing's first, though: I need a place to start moving stuff to. Multiple places makes it logistically difficult to manage.
I'm not invoking Godwin's law, I'm simply passing along something interesting that I found this morning. It appears that Nazi Germany was kicking around the idea of building a nuclear device during World War II. A document was found in a private collection that appears to outline at least the basics of an atomic bomb built into a missile body. None of the math that you'd expect to find is present, nor is much of the detail that you'd find in an actual technical schematic, but if this document is legit then it does at least strongly suggest that Nazi Germany knew about the Manhattan Project. There is nothing on the document that names who worked on it. There is also a lot of controversy over whether or not the Axis actually had a nuclear weapons programme of any kind; other documents found from that era state that the amount of enriched uranium was overestimated and the project was scrapped as infeasible due to the difficulty of enriching uranium at the time (and even now, truth be told).
A few weeks ago, the FCC discovered that they can't force the implementation of anticopying measures in televisions and other related equipment - it's not their jurisdiction. The MPAA is having kittens over this and has started lobbying Congress. The MPAA is attempting to pass a bill that says that the FCC does in fact have this power, so their broadcast flag bill will be passed more easily.
The way Congress has been passing bills in the past couple of years, I'm surprised that at least a few representatives haven't been selling votes for bills on eBay. This doesn't look good.
I'm waiting for the academic community to take this too seriously.
This fits the bill of coolness, if you ask me: A 90 piece traditional orchestra in Leipzig, Germany will be performing a number of classic C-64 chiptunes, such as International Karate by Rob Hubbard, Battlefield 2, and Morrowind. You can get more information at vgmconcerts.com.
Makes me wish I could jet out there to catch it. I missed the Final Fantasy soundtrack concert a few days ago, too...
Australian IT has a remarkably level-headed article on cyberterrorism that everyone should read.
This is wrong on so many levels. (note: For crying out loud, it has to do with goatse.cx - of course it isn't work safe!)
Canada's looking might nice this century...
Just because your statements were made "off the record" doesn't mean that people should not sit up and take notice of what's going on. "Off the record" doesn't mean "I didn't mean it" by any means, it means that you said something when you didn't think anyone was listening, and now you're trying to downplay it or pretend that it wasn't said.
One of the greatest mysteries of the past fifty years has been the identity of the person who leaked all that information regarding the Watergate Hotel burglary back in 1972, in which the US Democratic Party's offices were broken into (check out watergate.info for a good overview of the whole scandal). In the history and tales surrounding the break-in, a mysterious insider who came to be known as 'Deep Throat' leaked an awful lot of sensitive information, which wound up turning what seemed to be a simple B&E job into the scandal of the 20th century. Not too long ago, one W. Mark Felt, the 91 year old ex-assistant director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation came forward as Deep Throat. The two Washington Post reporters who broke the story of the Watergate scandal, Robert woodward and Carl Bernstein, confirmed that Felt was their contact who gave them so much information at the time. This comes after three decades of denials on Felt's part, even in the book he wrote in 1979, though given the stakes, I can't say that I blame him.
In other news, Sony is quietly releasing audio CDs that can only be copied a set number of times and the rips made cannot be copied after this is done. A company called First4Internet developed this so-called 'sterile copying' technology for them. It is said that over one million such CDs have been released to the public, though it isn't known yet which CDs they are. When this scheme has been cracked, you can bet that it'll be spread far and wide, just like the last few times. I also wonder if these disks will play in older CD players, which is another problem that cropped up as a result of anti-copying technologies.
The band Iris has announced the release of their latest album, titled Wrath on 23 August 2005. The album is undergoing its final mixdown at this time. It is unknown how many Hagaren cosplayers will be going Deadhead as a result.
I'm taking these stories with a hefty dose of salt, but it really wouldn't surprise me if records of anti-terrorism operations were being silently altered. The memo in .pdf format linked off of the first article is short and interesting: The memo states that all records inside the TECS (Treasure Enforcement Communication System) dealing with people who are known or suspected to be terrorists, or are on one of the famous secret lists of people who are not allowed to fly are to be altered to comply with something called HSPD-6 (Homeland Security Presidential Directive number 6) (referenced here; in short, it states that there must be a government organisation that handles screening for terrorists, analysis and dissemination of information pertaining to terrorists, and that there must be procedures in place fo handling, disseminating, and using that information). Specifically, records designated 'terrorist' must be updated to reflect the nature of the investigation into those people, and not the final designation. For example, if someone inside the TECS system is suspected of laundering funds for a terrorist cell, their records will be updated to reflect a financial investigation, and not a counter-terrorist investigation. If the dictates of the memo were followed, these sweeping changes were completed by 11 April 2005.
Doesn't this sound like it would confuse things needlessly? It would seem to me that if someone were being investigated as a terrorist of one kind or another they would be given higher priority than, say, some guy laundering money for the local protection racket. This makes sense. But reclassifying someone who really is laundering money for terrorists as 'just' someone laundering money gives them a lower priority in the stack of assignments of people to put under the microscope. Doesn't this sound like it would hinder hinder the War on Terror ™ by deliberately making terrorists appear to be less than top-priority?
The tsunami in December of 2004 exposed many artifacts lost for years beneath the waves. Elaborate rock carvings and even temples were exposed as tonnes and tonnes of sand were washed and blown away by the tidal wave that demolished a number of islands utterly.
Industrial espionage in Israel.
Apparently, it's only investigative journalism if you agree with what's been uncovered. Otherwise, it's blatant propaganda or muckraking.
What a load.
Speaking of loads, check out what happened to Dr. Thomas Butler.
Well, it's final.
I've been sitting on this development in my lives for a few weeks now. I'm superstitious in some ways; one is talking about job prospects before I know one way or another. I'm afraid that I'll jinx them if I let the cat out of the bag too soon, and it's been my experience that this happens more often than not.
I've also been keeping quiet about it because I didn't want to mess things up at work, which was a far larger concern than just not getting a job.
A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed with a voice-over-IP company in northern Virginia called Sunrocket. I've been sitting on razors waiting to hear whether or not I got the job, and being very careful to limit how far this information could get out, lest the jinx knock me out of the air again.
When I got home last Friday night I found in my mailbox a registered letter, a formal offer of employment, which I accepted as soon as I was able to (more of a problem than it might sound because it was Memorial Day weekend, and nothing was open). I also negotiated myself an extra two weeks, so I don't have to move down there in three days anymore. I start work at Sunrocket on 23 June 2005.
Rent for June has been paid, and a letter to my landlord with my letter of intent to break my lease early was delivered this morning. That buys me an extra week to clean out my apartment after I get things moving.
My current gameplan is to get my stuff either in storage in various places or moved down to DC; I'm moving in with Lyssa. This weekend will be spent checking out houses and apartments in areas within a reasonable distance of Vienna, Virginia, which is where Sunrocket's main office is located. This, of course, means a one hour commute at the best of times, but I'm fine with that. If there's a way that I can take the metro to get to and from work, I'll do that. The metro is certainly cheaper than paying gas and tolls every day. If not, well, we'll find a way. We always do.
The last time I was down there, we spent some time scouting for places to rent, and found two great townhouses in Rockville, MD, but unfortunately both are spoken for at this time, so the search continues. Lyssa has some leads on rental property which we're going to check out.
My tentative plan is to move at least some amount of stuff down there in the days to come and live at Lyssa's while we find a place to move to. I'm going to put a lot of my stuff in storage and find someplace to host the Children while my Speakeasy account is suspended for the move. When we do find a place to live we're going to move all at once. I still need to find a new car, though now that the insurance company's come through all I have to do is sign some papers and then I can look for new wheels.
I just realised something - there's a chance that I can get a vanity plate in the state I move to (either Virginia or Maryland). Neat.
I have two cross-country car trips planned in the next two weeks, so I'll haul some stuff down during each one. After the second I'm going to rent a U-Haul truck and empty my apartment out. I'm not looking forward to it, but I'm going to clean one last time after everything's gone. After I get everything into storage that needs to be stored (like my voluminous winter wardrobe) I'll be set to move the Children, and then that should give me a precious two or three days to rest before I start work at Sunrocket.
I handed in my resignation at work yesterday, and spoke to Bossman about it this morning. It's going to be rough on medSage, but I'm confident that they'll keep moving forward. I'm now in the documentation phase, which is less than fun but gives me a chance to codify everything that I do on a daily and weekly basis in one place at long last. I've got a couple of days to do this before I have to head out on the second trip, which has already been arranged for (I'm running at least one seminar while I'm there, and I can't leave it hanging).
Next steps (running concurrently): Get more strapping tape and boxes so I can continue packing, drop stuff off at various houses, and get the insurance paperwork signed so that I can start looking for another car.
Mark Nichols, formerly Cosmicity, has posted samples of his new stuff to his website.
I didn't remember that May had thirty-one days. Oops.
Fans of either the hottest thing since sliced bread or the most frustrating OS ever, depending on whom you speak to, will be interested to know that Debian Linux v3.1 is on its way. Scheduled for release on 6 June 2005, the Linux distro that put package repositories and automatic updates on the map is almost ready for prime time.
This morning was less than fun for me because I've been trying to meet in the middle with my car insurance company over the loss of my beloved Oldsmobile Cutlass GLS. As I mentioned, it's been totalled. This morning I drove out to the body shop with an extra gym bag to empty the rest of my stuff from the remains.
I had no idea of how nasty the carpet under each seat could be; we're talking movie theatre floor after the fourth showing of Episode III, here. When I walked up, a tiny spider skittered across the smashed trunk lid; perhaps a sign of... I don't know what. Spiders seem to pop up all around me when important stuff in my lives happens.
Anyway, the car's empty, and my bumper stickers have been pried from the rear window, along with my C'thul'hu magnet. That's the ball game.
Now I have to wait for the insurance company to get the paperwork to me so I can sign off on everything. The sooner I do that, the sooner I can start looking for a new car. Photographs are forthcoming.
Submitted for your approval and appreciation of hack value: Rigging up a Kinesis ergoboard using K'nex parts.
In a not-so-surprising-anymore turn, the US federal government turned to a court of appeals to regain its power to force ISPs to turn over their users' net.traffic statistics. This comes on top of the proposed renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act and the Federal Bureau of Investigation attempting to gain access to various sorts of information without having to get a warrant.
