Lucien's back up, everyone. I'm scheduling time for maintenance now.
Last night was something of an adventure (but isn't it always?)
As tasty as Lyssa's chicken soup is, we've been eating it for three days straight now and needed a break from it. I had to pick Lyssa up from work last night because the shuttle-bus to the Metro station wasn't coming, so we decided to drive around the area of the IBM industrial park (deliberately fudged out of consideration for their security folks, who kept looking at me funny) for dinner, and eventually settled on a Japanese restaurant called Sakura (12950 Fair Lakes Shopping Center, Fairfax, Virginia, 22033). The Sakura is a Japanese hibachi, which means that a) it's on the pricy side, but b) you're paying for good food, lots of it, and a show on top of all of that. Lyssa and I, of course, made friends with the sushi chef on duty and took him for all of the barbecued eel he had on the premises (it's addictive, I tell you!) and ordered the hibachi.
The hibachi: A chef's hands moving like lightning, juggling razor sharp steel knives, spatulae, and serving fork while turning piles of vegetables, rice, meat and seafood so fresh that the steak's still bleeding and shrimp into tasty dishes right before your eyes. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Go to a Japanese hibachi restaurant at least once, just to watch the show. Our chef last night was one of the funnier I've had, entertaining the kids and even tossing morsels into their mouths, though only with a so-so hit rate. I give the Sakura one flare gun; if any of my readers journey to the DC metropolitan area, give me a call and we'll go there for dinner.
Before stopping off for dinner, however, we stopped in at a hair products supply shop to get shampoo (which we were running out of) and dye for Kash's hair. Kash asked Lyssa to dye his hair a few weeks ago, and we've just now found the dye that he was looking for (finding things compatible with his odd biochemistry can be a challenge sometimes). Unfortunately, I got turned around while trying to get back to the beltway and we got home around 2100 EDT last night.
I'll cut to the chase and say that the dye didn't do what we expected it to do in Kash's hair. The front, dyed blue, wound up a nice shade of sea green with some silver thrown in. The rest of his hair, which was liberally soused with purple dye, turned out almost black, brown in some lights, and with a faint purple highlight under other kinds of light.
It doesn't look bad, far from it. It just didn't do what we thought it would. I've got a few pictures that I'll put up soon.
Kash seems satisfied with it.
Late last night, however, Lyssa recieved an e-mail that Beth Fitch, her friend and mentor all through undergrad, student teaching, and grad school had died in the hospital during emergency surgery. She was pregnant with her second child and something had gone wrong in the eighth month of gestation. Both mother and child went beyond some time yesterday. I don't have any more details than that.
We're going back to Pittsburgh on Friday for the memorial service. I can't say when we'll be back because we simply don't know. I'll write more as I figure out what's going on. There is some information regarding what happened but it's a few layers removed from the source, so its veracity is regrettably questionable at this time (ever played Telephone as a child?)
Users of the Snort IDS are no doubt familiar with how difficult it can be to sort through alerts to see what's going on in your network environment. At long last BASE - the Basic Analysis and Security Engine (forked from another Snort-related project, called ACID (which hasn't been maintained in ages)) has gone to the v1.2 release (available on their download page). While the project's website isn't updated very often, if you go to the Sourceforge page for the project you will find a lot of updates regarding releases, .rpm files for easy installation on Redhat-like distros, and all the other nifty stuff that Sourceforge makes available to the opensource community. I've been meaning to set up a Snort box to mess around with lately but haven't had the time. I've heard good noises about BASE, though it's a bit trickier to set up than ACID was (in my limited experience working with it). The biggest fix in the v1.2 release had to do with making it usable under PHP v5.
David Freeman, who founded the ACP Superstore, is auctioning off thirty years worth of computer hardware, software, documentation, and magazines on eBay because he can no longer maintain the collection. Among the gems in the lot on eBay are an ACI-90, an Acorn BBC Master, an Altair MITS 8800 with a full set of S-100 boards in excellent condition, an Apple Bell and Howell II+ (the very rare coal black Apple II+), a Lisa, a Bektop, an Amiga 4000, a Heathkit H89, a few Osbornes, a couple of Apple Newtons, and a Wang PC350/33C. Approximate weight of the whole shebang: 6000 pounds. As of 1059 EDT today, there have been 18 bids, with a current high bid of $3049.00us.
20 congressfolk that the MPAA and the RIAA have in their pockets are fighting to get Broadcast Flag legislation passed, even going so far as to send an open letter to one Fred Upton, Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet to say that if the Broadcast Flag isn't passed into law, free broadcast of TV will cease entirely within the US. At the end of this article is a link to send your congresscritters a letter...
You know, I'm really amazed that they're fighting so hard to get a television law passed. Fucking television, which is supposed to be recreation, escape, and occasionally a source of news for the people. The very same medium that so many millions of people will spend watching six or more hours every day rather than playing with their kids, going out and doing stuff, reading a book, or having a conversation with their neighbors. They're throwing everything they've got into 'protecting' one of the things that paralyses the people in the US with mindless, hypnotic pabulum. Maybe if, even for a moment, every television in the US lost its ability to show sitcoms, Fox News, so-called reality television shows, and MTV, the people in this country would look out of their windows at what the hell's been going on in the past decade and decide that things have to change... and that change would have to start with a handful of people, jacking out, going outside, and starting to fix the problems around them.
Don't like litter? Get a garbage bag and pick it up once a week. Crime? Neighborhood watch, cellphones, and not being afraid to sit outside at night. The war in Iraq? For pity's sake, sit down with a pad and paper and write a letter to your congresscritter, representative.. hell, George W. Bush if you think that it'll even make it past his mail screeners (he's gone on record that he has someone pitch all of the mail going to president@whitehouse.gov). But unplug and do something.
No links because they won't be safe for work (I didn't know that there were news feeds for adult site proprietors...): Is anyone else concerned that sites that are even vaguely adult in nature are being taken down left and right because the FBI is raiding them? Suicide Girls took down a few photo sets; some pages of adult fiction have gone offline because their servers were confiscated by the FBI.. what's next? Vanilla sites that someone with more delicate sensibilities than good sense to hit the back button on a web browser decide are obscene and calls the cops? What about fiction sites like fanfic.net or intellectual discourse about tantra and other practises? Hell, maybe stuff like this might make somebody angry and call for a police raid. Hit Google and search for stuff like 'adult site raid' when you get home to see what's going on.
Is it no longer safe to be an adult and think that maybe, just maybe, a MOTAS (member of the appropriate sex) might be attractive and that you might want to hook up?
Here's a neat article on building prototype robots.
Apparently, there is a patron saint of the Internet, computer technicians, computer users, and students: Saint Isidore of Seville.
Wow. Lyssa says it all.
 | You scored as Jean Grey. Jean Grey is likely the most powerful X-Man. She loves Cyclops very much but she has a soft spot for Wolverine. She's psychic so she can sense how others are feeling and tries to help them. She also has to control her amazing powers or the malevolent Phoenix entity could take control of her and wreak havok. Powers: Telekinetic, Telepathic
Most Comprehensive X-Men Personality Quiz 2.0 created with QuizFarm.com |
For Network users who are having problems picking up their e-mail, Lucien is currently offline for unknown reasons. I'll be trucking out to the hosting facility as soon as possible this week to either swap out hardware as required or install a replacement machine. My apologies for the problems we're experiencing. I'll fix everything as soon as I can.
I'm glad that I didn't go to Crossing the Thresholds this weekend. Not only was it cold and raining the whole time, but the county of Pennsylvania that it was held in was under a flood warning (not watch, warning) the whole time. That doesn't sound terribly fun to me. I just got over being sick, too.
For the first time in the history of the DARPA Grand Challenge, which is a competition of autonomously-piloted vehicles, there has been a winner. The computer-piloted vehicle entered by Stanford University finished the 132 mile desert course in six hours and fifty-four minutes. That sounds like a long time, but this is also the first time ever that a vehicle piloted by a computer has made it any distance. The Stanford team won a prize of $2mus for their efforts. Predictably, this is being hailed as a breakthrough for the automotive industry. DARPA is overjoyed that someone's finally figured out how to make it work because the whole purpose of this competition is to spur the development of technologies that can be used by the military in the field. Of all of the compeditors, one broke down at the starting line and another seventeen entrants conked out at various points along the course, presumably because the AI software running them came across a situation that they couldn't handle.
Some weeks ago I posted a link to an article about two webloggers in Singapore brought up on charges of sedition. Just a few days ago they were sentenced to jail on charges of sedition. Benjamin Koh Seng Huat, age 28, was sentenced to one month in jail; Nicholas Lim Yew, age 25, was sentenced to one day in jail and a fine of $5kus. While I can't condone the nature of their comments, I have to worry about the fact that webloggers anywhere could be brought up on charges. Sedition is a touchy thing because it can be defined as just about anything that the current regieme of $COUNTRY doesn't like.
As if it weren't enough that record labels are trying to suck money out of everything having to do with their employees, Warner is trying to squeeze revenue out of web searches, in particular by targetting Google Video. If you search for a particular video clip (say, the music video for Pump Up the Volume by MARRS (which, if you find it, please send me a copy!)), you will no doubt see adds served up by the search engine in question. Warner Brothers wants a cut of the revenue generated by the ads you see, even though they have nothing to do with that video search! They also are after remuneration for watching that video, if you happen to find it (which, I have to admit, makes sense). Neither Google nor Warner are talking about this matter, at least not openly.
Rather than treating parents like mature adults and expecting them to police what their kids spend their spare time with (and treating nutcases with a few bad registers on their CPUs like nutcases), Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California passed a bill that makes it illegal to sell violent and/or explicit games to minors. The bill makes it illegal to sell or rent games that are violent ("depict serious injury to human beings in a manner that is especially heinous, atrocious or cruel.") to kids under 18, with a maximum fine of $1kus.
Governor Schwarzenegger said not a word of the movies he's been in or images of Guantanamo Bay penal facility interrogations that have been making their rounds.
Lyssa and I are in one of the pictures from the chiarOscuro anniversary party!
It doesn't matter who you are or what you do, if they think you're a threat it's open season on your ass. Who's next?
Remember the bill introduced into the Indiana legislature that regulates who may and may not conceive children with external assistance? It turns out that Senator Patrica Miller of the state of Indiana has withdrawn the bill with the not-apology that "The issue has become more complex than anticipated". She has not said, however, that she would not re-introduce the bill in January of 2006.
What a weekend. I say that a lot, don't I?
Lyssa's brother and sister were in town and we spent the weekend hanging out with them to catch up. Friday night we took the Metro into downtown DC for dinner at an Indian restaurant called the Taj Mahal (1327 Connecticut Avenue Northwest, zipcode DC 20036-1844). Food there was reasonably priced, but they charge you for rice if you ask for it, and the price of alcohol is considerable ($11us for a beer?!), so be prepared to expense your meal. The quality of food there is excellent and the service is very attentive and very helpful if you're not sure what you'd like. The appetizer platter there is big enough for three people at most, so if you're with a larger group plan accordingly. The vegetable vindaloo is very tasty and not painfully hot. I'd recommend it if you like spicy food but not if you're new to spice food or Indian cuisine. The rice pudding dessert is very good and the flavours work well together. I give the Taj Mahal half a flaregun. Go if you're in the metropolitan DC area.
Afterward we hiked through the pouring rain to Biddy Mulligans (1500 New Hampshire Ave. Northwest) for a cold one or two after dinner. We wound up hanging out there for a good four hours shouting at one another (Biddy Mulligan's a popular place, and gets noisy on the weekends) and drinking beer (Guinness: Where's your mustache?). The price of beer there is pretty good, on the order of $6us per pint or so. That's good for the Dupont Circle area, let me tell you...
By the end of the night Lyssa and I were coughing hard from all the cigarette smoke and the cold air hadn't done much for us, either, so we hopped the Metro home (running for it a couple of times) back home before the time on the parking meter ran out.
Saturday was spent running around and getting ready for dinner that night; we'd offered to have Grant and Jill over for dinner and then go out for the night to have a good time. Lyssa made her famous chicken soup (from Grandma's recipe, the only way to make it) but we needed to find ingredients. As it turns out, yesterday's rain, wind, and cold gave everyone else the idea to make chicken soup, also, so we had a hard time finding a few things, and so we had to hit four separate stores to get what we needed. A far cry from the cool yet comfortable weather of earlier that day, shorts and t-shirts were a poor choice of clothing yesterday afternoon... running around was just that, in an effort to stay warm. Eventually, though, we got everything together and set to work. Lyssa took over the kitchen while I cleaned up the living and dining rooms, and worked the furniture over. Grant and Jill, thankfully, were late in coming, so wehad just enough time.
Dinner was a success - everything from the freshly-baked bread to the soup went over very well, though we never quite made it to dessert. Lyssa and I changed rapidly so that we could head to chiarOscuro.
Of course, we got lost. Badly lost. Left at 2200 EDT, got there around 0000 EDT. Lovely.
It isn't that I can't find my way around because I don't like to go anywhere, quite the opposite. I don't like going anywhere because I can't find my way around. I don't make mental maps of the world very well.
Once we finally got there we settled in nicely. Grant isn't much of a dancer, though he did spent some time talking to one of the club's usuals, whom he'd taken a shining to. Jill had a few drinks and joined Lyssa and I on the dancefloor for the remainder of the night. The mix was fast and electic, from 70's disco tunes to 80's U2 to relatively old-school EBM and new-school goth. I think I spent a grand total of ten minutes resting last night and the rest of the night dancing. We finally called it quits around 0200 EDT this morning, trooped back to the TARDIS, and headed home by way of College Park, Maryland and Plato's for an early breakfast and water to rehydrate. Getting home was far easier at 0400 EDT with no one else on the beltway and familiar territory. Jill had sobered up enough to drive Grant home before she caught her flight back home.
Grant and Jill had a great time last night, and asked to come with us the next time we go.
I wound up sleeping until 1500 EDT or so out of sheer exhaustion, and after getting dressed hit the store to get groceries for the week to come while Lyssa cleaned up after the dinner party. We've spent the evening not doing much of anything and having a bit of dinner.
Weird! Russian technical footage of early resuscitation experiments!
A brain implant that replaces the hippocampus.
Back to more self-enforced net.disconnection due to carpal tunnel syndrome.
In response to the forthcoming BBC documentary I posted about yesterday in which George W. Bush admitted to taking orders direct from $DEITY itself, the White House has gone into damage control mode, taxing their spin management resources even further. One Scott McClellan, spokesman for Bush, called the claims absurd. Nabil Shaath, former Palestinian foreign minister, is sticking to his guns, saying that he was there when it happened. McClellan admitted that he wasn't there and is just doing his job.
While I'm posting updates to current events, the disease that killed sixteen people in Toronto was probably Legionnaire's Disease, an unusual variety of pneumonia named after its first outbreak, an American Legion in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania back in 1976. David Miller, mayor of Toronto, stated that the disease is environmental and thus not contagious between people, and so is not a threat to Toronto as a whole.
Holy shit... now this deck is used up.
I think I saw quite a few of these fashions in some of these books.
I hope this precedent sticks: The Supreme Court of the state of Delaware has decided that an ISP doesn't have to rat out an anonymous blog poster who criticised an elected official. Patrick Cahill, councilman of the town of Smyrna, Delaware, was told that he needed to build a stronger case that he and his wife had been defamed before filing a lawsuit against Comcast to release the identities of the posters. The anonymous posters, unfortunately, didn't act like intelligent beings but posted obscenities and speculations as to the sex lives of Cahill and his wife. I'm all for this precedent, but it feels wasted because of the lack of maturity and intelligence on the part of the anonymous posters.
BitTorrent users should take note that HBO is actively poisoning running torrents of Rome, one of their shows to mess with people. The folks behind PeerGuardian have noted the IP addresses that are causing the trouble and added them to the blacklist of their software. The news article also has a list of all of the IP addresses, in case you'd like to block them yourself.
Now, in case you're not familiar with BitTorrent, it's a peer-to-peer filesharing application that distributes the load for a given file across a large number of IP addresses who all have some percentage of the file. What you do is you go to a BitTorrent tracker and browse through their lists of shared files for something that looks good to you, and then you either download the .torrent file (like I do) or plug the URL to a .torrent into your BitTorrent client and it goes out and gets a list of the IP addresses of everyone who has some part of the file you're looking for and starts downloading it by downloading a piece from everyone else and reassembling it. At the same time, your client shares the parts that you've already downloaded so that others can do the same thing. The way the files are broken up, each chunk has an integrity check associated with it, so that if it's corrupted it can be re-downloaded (perhaps from another peer in that torrent). The latest version of BitTorrent doesn't even require a tracker website; as long as you can get a .torrent file somehow newer revisions of the client can figure out who has what parts by itself, without an intermediary, and run independent of a hub site. BitTorrent's really taken off since its creation: On a given tracker you can find just about anything you might be looking for. Distributors of various open-source operating systems are using it to distribute CD-ROM and DVD-ROM images; bands and indie movie producers are using it to make their work know.
And yes, you can get pirated stuff using BitTorrent, from crappy bootlegs of movies to albums to television shows. It's the only way to get some stuff that is long out of print, too - if, for example, Fox would release the television show Parker Lewis Can't Lose on DVD, I'd snap up the boxed sets in a heartbeat, but because they haven't it's the only way to get episodes of it. I don't have time right now to record my videotapes of the show to DVD (my equipment being forty miles away at all times also puts the kibosh on this), so one does what one can to preserve VHS tape. BitTorrent is the way that shows like the BBC's reboot of Doctor Who and the fansubs of Fullmetal Alchemist became so popular so fast with so many people.
On the fifth of October, the US Senate voted 90 to 9 to establish hard and fast rules for interrogation of detainees by the military. Senator John McCain of Arizona drafted the bill, which cut across party lines. Because he spent a few years in the Hanoi Hilton during his tour in Vietnam, the other senators tend to defer to him on matters like this. An amendment to this bill is supposed to clarify the exact legal status of the Guantanamo Bay detainees. Bush is talking already about vetoing this bill.. the first veto during his entire tenure as President. More to come on that as I get around to searching.
Some time ago (I don't remember how long) Microsoft tried to file a few patents on the FAT file system, which would require payment of licensing fees if you wanted to develop anything that could read your average floppy disk or USB storage key. The US Patent Office turned it down in September but just got around to mentioning it because there was prior art (i.e., someone implemented the FAT file system before Microsoft started using it). This lets a lot of manufacturers of solid-state storage media off the hook, as well as just about every opensource implementation of it out there. Shortly after that release was made public, Nick McGrath, head of platform strategy of Microsoft announced at the Linuxworld Conference that Microsoft still has no plans to port Office to Linux.
It's more direct to just flag off the audience than to mention that again.
Opensource vulnerability scanner Nessus won't be opensource anymore when Tenable releases v3 due to the number of people who never contributed anything and the number of companies who sold Nessus appliances.
A little change in Florida law for you - this one allows private people to use deadly force against intruders under certain cirucmstances.
I try to learn something new every day, and have an feeling of amazement that I'd like to share. Your word of the day is Pelagianism.
Thanks, Nagasiva.
I didn't the first test of the new Supreme Court nominee would happen so soon. The matter in question is this: Should it be legal for doctors in the state of Oregon to prescribe lethal doses of medication to terminally ill patients if they're asked to? The Supreme Court is split on this matter; Roberts is hanging back and not saying anything to anyone. Twice, the people of Oregon have voted to approve the Death With Dignity Act, which allows two different doctors to decide that a patient has six months or less to live and grant to that patient their request to die. The Act was passed in 1997; by the end of 2004 208 people have taken advantage of it. A bigger debate here (if there can be one bigger than life and death) is that by allowing a state government to decide if this is permissible, does it in fact diminish the authority of federal law?
I really hope that they keep the Die With Dignity Act in place. It sets a hopeful legal precedent for the rest of the country.
Just a day after the symptoms of my cold abate, this winds up in the news. At the Seven Oaks Home for the Aged in Toronto, Canada, a mysterious respiratory infection has claimed sixteen lives and left thirty-eight other people hospitalised. Toronto's Medical Officer of Health, Dr. David McKeown, says that it isn't SARS, Legionnaire's Disease, or the Avian flu but something else. Everyone who's died thus far have been venerable in age or physically frail. There is some evidence that the outbreak is running its course.
If you'd like to fax a few Congresscritters about the MPAA trying to sneak the Broadcast Flag into law by hiding it in another bill, check out this page to find their contact info.
I think I'd like to go to this...
Huh. Remember that "single play DVD" story I linked to yesterday? It's a hoax, and a lot of different news sources bought into it. Oops.
Now I'm very disturbed.
The BBC is running a series soon about the war in Iraq, and I'm definitely going to get my hands on it?
Why?
Because I'd like to see if this quote is from a transcript someplace or from actual video footage: "I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq " And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"
The idea of George W. Bush hearing the voice of God inside his head, as clearly as you would hear the voice of the person next to you, scares me. That sounds a little too much like schizophrenic auditory hallucinations for comfort, especially because the man with the power to command an army and authorise the launch of nuclear weapons is involved.
I honestly hope that this is jetwash.
At 1400 EDT today in Missouri it became illegal to get a medical abortion. I wonder if the Missouri state government is going to start offering coat hangers to do things right.
Welcome back to the 60's, without all the hippies and good pot.
For the privacy concerned out there, there's a patch for tsocks that eliminates DNS leaks entirely and lets you access .onion darknet addresses without fancy hacking.
Still waiting to get my vehicle property tax sticker from the county.. I'm thinking of calling the county office to find out what they're doing with it. I don't feel like paying fines for not having one.
...just checked. I had to have my paperwork in by today (which it was; I actually sent it out somewhen around the first weekend of September), I don't have to have the sticker itself on my car until 15 November 2005. I've got some time.
Another thing that pisses me off about living around here: They threaten you with fines for unspecified amounts out the wazoo (no one I've spoken to at the DMV or in the municipal government around here seems to know how much these fines are) but they sure take their sweet old time sending you the forms you request or processing your vehicle registration. I didn't have this much trouble with anything back in Pittsburgh.
It's only taken the FDA five years to get around to this: They've decided that it might be a good idea to withhold cattle brains and spinal cords from animal feed to reduce the risk of transmission of the BSE prions, after being familiar with the transmission vector of bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("Mad Cow Disease") for a number of years. Moreover, the same nervous system tissue from cattle that weren't certified for human consumption can't be used in animal feed, either. The cattle in question must be at least thirty months of age, in accord with a study performed at Harvard University. Critics are still complaining because the new directives allow other forms of infectious tissue into cattle feed, which can then infect healthy cattle with the BSE prions.
How about three words of the day for you? Church, cult, and sect.
Didn't someone already try this? And didn't it bomb shortly after its release?
I really have to wonder what the hell they're thinking in the state of Indiana. Effective 1 July 2006, some new laws about sex will come into effect. I found that document linked off of this news article. (note: I'm reading the bill itself and writing this entry.) The new law starts off by defining 'assisted reproduction' and then defines what a child would be considered legally, including children born out of wedlock, adopted kids, and unborn children (though not the age at which a fetus is considered a child). The bill then, interestingly, defines what it means to "Conduct a criminal history check."
If you're like me, the hackles on the back of your neck just went up.
The term 'donor', insofar as assisted conception is defined, along with some fiddly legal stuff like 'gestational agreement'... Section 8, IC 31-9-2-63.2 states that 'intended parents' do not include anyone who is unmarried; by the legal definition of this, this includes same-sex couples. Legal parentage must be established through a procedure outlined in the document; I thought that becoming a parent was a pretty straightforward process, but Indiana will require some hoop-jumping. Then the really interesting stuff jumps out, down in section 12, IC 31-20-2, chapter 2, section 11, part b: "A physician may not commence an assisted reproduction technology procedure that may result in a child being born until the intended parents of the child have recieved a certificate of satisfactorycompletion of the assessment required inder section 12 of this chapter." In case you lost track, that includes the background check and filing a metric buttload of paperwork. The assessment in section 12 includes a list of interesting facts, such as "values", "relationships", and "personality description". Don't have a bad day when you're being evaluated for fitness to have kids, ladies and gentlemen.
So, you'll not only have to be a saint to have a kid in Indiana next year, but you have to be legally married, too, otherwise you'll be committing "unauthorised reproduction", which will be a class B misdemeanor.
Now, if you're one of my regular readers, you've probably heard me mention from time to time that I don't plan on having any kids, so why should I care about whether or not anyone else has kids?
The answer's not that simple. I'm a CoE member, which means that, up until I decide to reproduce and tender my resignation to the Church of Euthanasia, there won't be any little Time Lords running around Washington, DC. That does not mean that I think that everyone should not reproduce. I fully understand that what's right for me might not be right for everyone else, but I set an example (please, no jokes about being the bad example). If it's your W/will to bring another life into this world, fine. If it's not, that's fine too. I won't get in anyone's way, because I personally dislike when someone else pushes their values down my throat because they find my values objectionable. But I do have a big, big problem when someone else, be it a person or a controlling structure, like a state government, takes it upon itself to decide who is and is not fit to have a child. Now, I'm almost inclined to agree with their dictates that you can't be granted parentage if you've killed a few people and were thrown in prison for it, but it's the provisions for personality, family structure, and the other stuff that bother me. Classic example: Same-sex couple. Another example: Working mother who, let's say, didn't agree with the way the law generally treats people defending themselves (you break a mugger's jaw and the muggee gets thrown in jail). This stinks like a fried motherboard. Thankfully, one of the articles has contact information for a number of Indiana state officials, so it might be wise to call a few of them and make your opinions known.
The reptilian battle of the tough guys...
Wow.. the Catholic Church is now saying that some parts of the Bible should not be taken literally. I don't know if they're afraid of what's going on over here or not, but they're refuting the Book of Revelations now.
Still on the sick side of life; the hacking cough's set in, much to Lyssa's consternation. We made a quick trip out to Kinko's last night to fax some documents out (her employers still haven't gotten them for some obscure reason) and just to be safe we Fed-Ex'd the originals to make sure that they arrive. We also made a side trip to a most interesting store just down the block from Kinko's, where the staff was nice enough to hang out well after closing with us talking shop. That's the first time anything like that's happened around here. I would have gotten more rest last night if it weren't for my pager going off every few minutes...
The restructuring of the Supreme Court of the United States continues, and this time both extremes of the political spectrum are wondering what the hell George W. Bush is thinking with the nomination of Harriet Miers as the replacement for Sandra Day O'connor. Miers isn't actually a judge, she's a lawyer - she was, until recently, the personal lawyer of George W. Bush, in fact. While she was active in private practise until recently, and encouraged lawyers in Texas to do pro bono work to help the public (she herself did incredible amounts of pro bono work in Texas). She does not, however, have a background in Constitutional law, which would set her at odds to the rest of the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court has to make a lot of judgement calls in this sphere of law. She also doesn't have many articles to her credit (only two), something else that sets her apart from the other Supreme Court justices.
Tom DeLay's in pretty hot water now, because he's been brought up on new charges by the Texas grand jury, namely, money laundering. The charges were filed just hours after DeLay's lawyers filed a motion to drop the charges of ethics violations levelled against him last week. It should be noted that these new charges were filed by an entirely different jury in Texas. The specifics are that he conspired to launder $190kus contributed by corporations through a subsidiary organisation of the Republical National Committee to fund the election campaigns of various candiddates in Texas, which goes against Texas law. These charges prevent DeLay's reinstatement as majority leader, also.
It remains to be seen exactly why this has drawn the attention of the US government after all this time about electronic voting problems, but it seems that they've convened a panel called the United States' Election Assistance Commission which is charged with finding ways to tighten electronic voting security.. seems a little too late, to me, since the source code to the Diebold voting machines was leaked years ago (with security holes that you could drive a truck through). They've already stated that e-voting was not designed with security in mind (duh) and that the voting process is no longer transparent to the voter for open review. They recommend that the testing process be opened to the public for analysis and review, along with the systems themselves. Companies developing e-voting hardware and software have been complaining that opening their systems up threatens their intellectual property; security pundits are arguing that this is a security-through-obscurity ploy. No date of release for the commission's report has yet been published.
Disney's online Virtual Magic Kingdom has some pretty broken autocensoring routines, it appears.
Denizens of Prince Williams county, Virginia take note: The police down there are stocking up on unmarked cars for traffic control purposes. An associate of mine has spotted a number of Camaros (!) that have been retrofitted with the LED flasher lights used by Virginia police down here on the side mirror housings, bumpers, rear ends, and inside the grilles. I've not yet been able to confirm this, but the license plates all begin with the string 'ZX'. I've heard rumours that some of the police officers in these cars have coerced clueless high school kids into drag-racing with them only to nail them a short time later for speeding and reckless driving (which seem to go hand-in-hand down here) but I've not seen it first hand yet. As always, remember that radar detectors are illegal down here, as are police scanners under certain circumstances - more on this here.
I'd also take care on the beltway heading north, around exit 45 - there's a maintenance road there with parked construction vehicles and resurfacing raw materials that marked police cars hide out in around peak traffic times (between 1600 and 2000 EST/EDT). Please, folks.. don't drive like assholes on the beltway. Traffic's bad enough due to the sheer volume of vehicular traffic.
Is it really possible to hide from Google? It is, but it's not easy these days...
I'm going to have to post a review of my favourite privacy-protection tricks one of these days.
The MPAA is still lobbying Congress with all its might to reinstante the broadcast flag. Declan McCullagh has done a little homework and dug up the names of the representatives who are acting as liaisons for private interests (I didn't think that they could do that) and put them at the end of this article. I'd suggest reading through that list to see if your congresscritter's in there, and maybe make a phone call or write a letter if they are. I know that Mike Doyle of Pennsylvania is in that list, and he'll be getting a call from me sometime today.
I still feel sick, even after a breakfast high in vitamin-C and some Claritin, but on the bright side of things I don't feel utterly wasted like I did yesterday. My sinuses don't hurt anymore and my throat feels a lot better, though I still have a little trouble hearing and tasting things. Lyssa and I crashed around quarter of midnight last night and slept straight through until morning. Well, she did, anyway. I woke up a few times to scan around the bedroom for a bit but thankfully went promptly back to sleep. I'm not sure if it was my body wanting to wake up because I slept so much this weekend or what, but it definitely wasn't due to my internal defenses going off. I woke up feeling loads better than the night before - relaxed and ready to face the day. I've still got a dry cough from my throat being irritated and my sinuses are draining, but I can't complain too much because I'm up and around.
This article has a lot of fluff in it, but if you dig a bit you'll get to the interesting bits - Johnson & Johnson is going to start marketing duct tape bandages to the DIY set. Talk about field repairs...
And to think that people joke about Pennsic first aid, which consists of a roll of duct tape and zip-lock baggies or credit cards to patch sucking chest wounds.
Even though George W. Bush has mentioned wanting to alter the Posse Comitatus Act of 1978 to give the US military the power to act on American soil, the idea of such restrictions being removed bothers a lot of people - even the White House itself. I'm all for defending the US, but the armed forces aren't trained or designed for police duty, they're trained for combat. The skills and strategies used by police are different in many ways, and the risk of applying them in an urban environment is to great to life and limb. That's actually what SWAT teams are meant for.
If you spend any time on the net at all, you've probably heard about the RIAA suing people left and right for copyright infringement. Their MO is to file a batch of "John Doe" lawsuits to force ISPs to track down users via IP addresses, and then retract the John Doe suit so that they can file a directly targetted lawsuit. One Tanya Anderson, age 41, of Oregon is countersuing the RIAA for a list of charges that goes on for pages and pages. Among the things that she accuses the RIAA of in court is racketeering, filing harassing lawsuits that waste the court's time and resources, using a private company to extort money from people who don't even know that they're being sued (the John Doe information-discovery lawsuits), violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 USC 1030) by cracking her computer, rifling her personal information, and making unauthorised copies of it... <deep breath> harassment.. the list goes on and on. The lawsuit she filed comprises the majority of the article I've linked to but it doesn't have much in the way of legal jargon in it. I strongly suggest sitting down and reading it, because it has to do with the RIAA filing a lawsuit against someone who probably didn't do anything (a 41 year old single mother listens to gangsta rap?)... because your ISP might give them a name just to get the RIAA's dogs off their leg, you might be next.
| The Keys to Your Heart |
 In love, you feel the most alive when everything is uncertain, one moment heaven... the next moment hell. You'd like to your lover to think you are stylish and alluring. You would be forced to break up with someone who was ruthless, cold-blooded, and sarcastic. Your ideal relationship is open. Both of you can talk about everything... no secrets. Your risk of cheating is zero. You care about society and morality. You would never break a commitment. You think of marriage as something precious. You'll treasure marriage and treat it as sacred. In this moment, you think of love as something you thirst for. You'll do anything for love, but you won't fall for it easily. |
I'm not sure where I stand on this, but I find it interesting just the same - androgyny as pop culture. I find it very interesting that genderqueer folk are starting to become more prominent in society today. It might signal a change in direction, away from the dualistic paradigm that most everyone in the west is indoctrinated wit from childhood onward. I also like how the sense of playfulness was brought up; a lot of the genderqueer folks I hang out with tend to not take themselves so seriously, which is a breath of fresh air these days.
It appears that the Hagane no Reinkinjutsushi/Fullmetal Alchemist fandom has begun to celebrate the third of October, the date that Edward and Alphonse Elric burned their family home to the ground. It'll be interesting to see what they do with this...
I feel like I need a vacation from my weekend.
Friday was, to be blunt, an utter clusterfuck. A routine procedure at work blew up like an armed hand grenade dropped into the HVAC system of an office building, which necessitated being jacked in until well after 2000 EDT Friday night, talking to tech support and trying to coordinate with everyone else on duty at that time.
Suffice it to say that it wasn't a very good day. In fact, I rather wish that Friday had simply never happened at all, and if I could go back and delete it from my timeline, I would gladly do so.
It was enough of a crisis that I was scarcely able to get word back home that I didn't know what time I'd get back. By the time I left the office I was just about dead on my feet, running purely on programmed responses. To my great surprise, I was greeted at the front door by not only Lyssa, but Kash and Hasufin, also. Lyssa and Kash had put together an incredible dinner for me to come home to, and Hasufin found, in the back of the fridge, a bottle of Arrogant Bastard Ale, which I'd all but forgotten about. Unfortunately I wasn't quite able to leave work at work that night, as Hasufin and I spent a while talking about everything that had gone on, but eventually I'd relaxed enough to enjoy not having to worry for a while.
Dinner, in the form of a salad, corn fritters, parmesan and pepper bread, and chili, was the perfect way to cap off a week that'd been running me ragged. We wound up not going to the premiere of Mirrormask that night, much to my relief. I'm not sure that I would have been able to safely make it to downtown DC. As it was, I couldn't even stay awake to watch Carnivale with Lyssa and Kash because I fell asleep on the floor of the office. Lyssa put me to bed sometime before midight, and I slept staight on until ten the next day.
On Saturday, Lyssa and I drove Hasufin to the airport to catch his flight, because our employer is sending him on a business trip overseas for a couple of weeks. The drive out to Dulles was simple: Follow the road signs and you can't miss the airport. The drive home, however, was a bit more complex, in that route-7 takes on no fewer than three different names between Dulles International and Vienna. If you are simply trying to backtrack your path, this will cause you no end of consternation. Moreover, this is the most common navigation problem in the Washington DC metropolitan area.
Hell, let's call it a sprawl. That's what it is, after all - a number of large cities that have all run together into a single metroplex.
Once we found our way back to Vienna, we stopped off at Tiffany's - yes, the super-upscale jewelry store where you have to be properly dressed just to get notice from the staff and not security. Seeing as how Lyssa and I were nicely done up (of course, in a nonstandard manner as they reckon it, which pretty much means leather, lace, and silver jewelry - photographs to come) we made it in the front door without too much trouble to check out engagement rings and wedding bands. While trying my best to look like I could actually afford stuff there without having to resort to kidnapping random people off the street to sell their internal organs for spare parts overseas, I was able to observe a number of things that gave me pause. A woman holding a gold and diamond bracelet with a slip of paper (which I wasn't able to sneak a peek at) was arguing with a member of the staff because she wanted to know whom had purchased it for her and, interestingly enough, she wanted to get hold of the credit card information used to acquire the card.
The staff member politely rebuffed her, stating that they could state who had purchased the bracelet but could not provide the credit card information.
The woman, angry, tore the notes out of the clerk's hand and demanded to meet the manager to straighten things out.
I was also surprised by the number of people for whom management of the Tiffany's store bolted from their offices to greet them personally. As far as I could tell, I had no idea who these folks were.. they looked like your average Jane or Joe off the street: Middle aged, maybe with a spare tire, maybe losing their hair or going silver, maybe a little on this side of deaf, with whom the managers of Tiffany's were on a first-name basis and talking about grandkids and how things had been going in the past five or six years.
My mind was blown, watching this. Will I ever get that rich, or become that important? I simply don't know. I can't fathom it.
We stopped off to gas up the TARDIS and investigate the "MAINT REQ'D" light that had winked to life on the console scant minutes before (note: the manual states that this means that I need to go in for a 5000 mile oil change) and then set course for Maryland to prowl around the mall down there for some clothes for Lyssa. Once again, we drove around seeking a parking space, and eventually got lucky on the northernmost edge of the mall parking lot, and then headed inside. The mall we wound up going to is only a bit smaller than the Tyson's Corner Mall just down the road from us but just as twisty to navigate, even when you have a map of the complex.
Have you ever played Quake III or Descent II and gotten so horribly lost that it's easier to start the level over and re-do your map from scratch? That's what it was like.
We eventually found the stores we were looking for (all in a row, no less) and spent the afternoon looking at clothing. Not worth clothes, for we have quite enough of those, but clothes that we can bum around the house in and relax on the weekends. The folks there were very helpful and suggested a few things that Lyssa would like, and after much trying things on and sorting we settled on a few pieces of clothing. Our next stop was the Waldenbooks next door, which was running a five for the price of four sale on sci-fi and fantasy novels. Unfortunately, their selection isn't very good so we did not partake of this particular sale. Lyssa found the latest volume of Model while I chanced across a copy of Mage: The Awakening (White Wolf's re-do of the Mage game), which I'd been searching for since the release date in August. I've heard some good things about it, and some bad things, and decided that I'd have to read it myself to decide. If worse comes to worst, I'll re-sell it on Amazon to get rid of it.
Afterward we headed back to Virginia. I contacted my boss at work to see if we were still going to do maintenance at our usual time, what with the massive fuck-up on Friday, but as it turns out it was still a 'go', which meant an all nighter last night. We hit up Trader Joe's for groceries and managed to fill our cart and make it out of there without attracting the attention of the scarier folks who work there.
Dinner was left-overs from Friday night (of which there were many) with a few hacks to change the flavour and stretch things a bit. Kash, who'd gotten lost in downtown DC after spending the day at the Maryland renfaire, made it back safe and sound for dinner. It was around this time that I noticed that not only was I developing a sinus headache, but dinner had taken on a decidedly flat and bland taste... uh-oh.
Maintenance began at 0000 EDT and went on through the night. One by one, everyone went to bed as I worked... thankfully, the night had no surprises and no problems. At least, from a technical perspective.
By the time 0500 EDT rolled around, when my shift was over, I'd realised that I'd come down with a cold, the first of year (which is usually the worst). I guess all the stress of the past few days coupled with the change in temerature had crashed my body's immune system. I'm now going through tissues like they're going out of style, I slept until noon and still feel worn out, my stomach is upset, and my sinuses feel like someone stuffed a test-tube brush up my nose sometime during the night and rubbed them raw.
I'm definitely not looking forward to work tomorrow.
Travel safely, Hasufin.
Yesterday was a day of wholly unnecessary excitement. The problems around the apartment had gotten to the point where we couldn't cope with them anymore, and we'd been fighting with the maintenance office to get them repaired. After two letters and innumerable phone calls I finally got through to someone at the office of our apartment complex and laid it out for them.. again, they assured me that they'd send someone out to fix things today.
The bathroom drains are clear. The faucets in the tub were replaced. They supposedly cleaned up the clusterfuck in the kitchen, though they'd left such a mess after the fix that we had to throw away everything that was sitting out. When we'd stopped by the rental office after work yesterday (about quarter until 1800 EDT - this is important), we made to sure lay everything out, in person, in detail, for Mark, who handles rental agreements. He, too, reassured us that everything woudl be taken care of. We returned home to check things out... and discovered that maintenance had jammed the front door. No way in.
Call the front office - that was around 1800 EDT. No answer. Drove back to the office in a hell of a big hurry.. the rental office was closed and dark. Everyone leaves at 1800 sharp, no exceptions.
After some jiggery-pokery with their voicemail system, I figured out how to get to the emergency line and explained the situation to the operator. She paged maintenance, who then came out and forced the front door open.
I have no idea what the hell happened there.. I do know that the front plate of the lock is damaged around the keyway and none of our keys would fit into it the way they were supposed to.
Due to the mess in the kitchen, we wound up calling Hasufin and going out for dinner again, this time for Thai food in the next town over. After a rather tasty dinner, we parted ways. Hasufin is working on a project that he hopes to complete before his business trip in a couple of days and Lyssa and I needed to restock the kitchen.
I really need to stop eating out.
Thinking about eating out, this article gave me pause, then made me snort in annoyance. "Bay Area foodies cope with U.S. ban of Beluga caviar"... my hearts bleed for those folks. No, really, they do. They'll pay twice as much for petrol over there to fill up their SUVs as I pay in a month for electricity and gas without blinking, and yet you bitch about caviar...
Feh.
This makes me smile: Urchin is developing A Commodore-64 emulator for the Playstation Portable.
This should give you as much faith in the TSA as it did me: They can't search their passenger records to get any useful information!
Wow... I'm not the only heretic who jacks out from time to time. I might be a technomage, but even I need a break now and then.
I don't know if this is an actual mistake on someone's part or not, but it's pretty damning, nonetheless. The FCC has released a policy document that states that consumers can run whatever software they want on their systems, subject to the needs of law enforcement. The last seven words are a direct quote from the document, on the third page of the FCC document linked off of that post (I'll put up a mirror of it if anyone asks for it), part four, point two. I don't like the sound of that... if the FCC or someone petitioning it asks that PGP, for example, not be permitted under right of use, which I think it utter bullshit because the purchaser of a system can do whatever they please with it, they could conceivably ban it. Not that they could enforce it all that easily, mind you. Unless you raid each and every home in the country to examine each and every box, there's no way that you could stamp out any kind of software. Declan McCullagh makes a good point that this directive was published the same day that their extensions to CALEA were published.
What is it about autumn down here that makes people forget how to drive?
I live less than five miles from work.. why is it that traffic on the highway
that runs past my building has been so clogged every evening this week that a
simple five mile drive takes nearly two hours to complete? I left work around
1700 EDT yesterday, and was very surprised to find that traffic was at a virtual
standstill for nearly two hours. I sat in traffic, immobile, long enough to
finish roughly a third of the Perl Cookbook
Nearly two hours to go five miles...
Checking the news shows no car accidents, drug raids, flat tires, or anything else that seems to bring traffic to a screeching halt in the DC metropolitan area. I've no bloody clue what's causing it, but I think I'm going to be taking the back way home tonight, just in case.
Lyssa and I met up with Hasufin and Butterfly shortly after I returned home and rather than brave traffic to get groceries (I've yet to make it to the grocery store this week, and we really need to stock up) we drove to the Silver Diner down the block for dinner. I wound up blowing off steam about everything that's been going on at work lately and generally tried to unwind after what has been a bear of a week. We hit the road for Rialian's around 2000 EDT, and made it in good time, surprisingly.
In other news, House Majority Leader Tom Delay, who is famous for playing fast and loose with ethics and money was indicted yesterday, along with two colleagues; this has forced him to resign as Majority leader. The Republican Party took a swift kick between wind and water when this bombshell dropped, and questions are coming fast and furious. The Texas Grand Jury has charged him with conspiracy to circumvent campaign finance laws, which is only one of several laws that he's broken in the past few years. If convicted he's facing up to two years in jail and a fine of up to $10kus. A letter writing campaign calling for DeLay to resign from the House also began this morning.
As if that weren't enough to make you sit up and take notice, John Roberts, Junior will be confirmed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, even though he's managed to dodge just about every question posed to him, on topics ranging from personal privacy to women's rights. His confirmation could be pushed through as early as next Monday so he can begin working on stuff like assisted suicide and abortion. He's mentioned a number of times that the Supreme Court can overturn precedent-setting rulings, such as Roe v. Wade. Roberts was quoted as saying that "If the Constitution says that the little guy should win, then the little guy's going to win in the court before me. But if the Constitution says that the big guy should win, well then the big guy's going to win because my obligation is to the Constitution."
This doesn't give me a whole lot of confidence in him, given how the current regeime has been consistently ruling in favour of the big guys. Too bad this didn't get much press when it was first published.
This strikes me as being just a little paranoid...
Still more word on using human stem cells to repair peripheal neural damage has come out of Korea. A woman who has been paralysed for 19 years was treated using umbilical stem cells and has regained mobility and sensation below the point of spinal cord damage. She can now move her hips and feet and has some degree of sensory capability. Motor activity was confirmed seven days after implantation; she could stand thirteen days later; she was able to move her legs without assistance fifteen days later. As if that's not enough, 41 days after the procedure was performed, neural tissue regeneration was confirmed. In case you're interested, I've found a good description of the lumbar laminectory procedure that the woman had undergone. If you download this .pdf file (confirmed work-safe) and click to page 30, you'll see a picture of the woman who underwent this procedure standing with a walker. Perhaps after 19 years of atrophy, her leg muscles aren't yet capable of supporting her weight.
Why is it that all the intersting research on this technology is coming from overseas... think about that.
This is nifty.. what could be the first legally recognised polyamorous marriage on the planet took place in the Netherlands between Victor de Brujin and his two partners, Bianca and Mirjam.
Fall has definitely come to the DC metropolitan area. The air is crisp and cool more often than not these mornings, with just a hint of humidity. The sun is also not rising as far as it once did, and the flatness of the light makes it hard to see most of the time. My favourite time of the year is here, at least for a while. I'm probably going to start wearing longer sleeves and jackets outside these days, because it's taking longer and longer for my hands to warm up enough so that I can use them for anything.
I dearly love this time of year.. everything's winding down. The plants are dropping off and settling in for a few months of sleep. The birds will begin migrating south soon. The air is nice and cool. Night-time grows longer; daytime grows sharper and more flat, more harsh. The sky tends to grow a bit more grey, a little darker, a little more overcase.. I can't say why I love it the way I do, only that I've always had special places in my hearts for autumn.
Gotta have some of that tentacle love.. since Victorian times, the giant squid, sometimes referred to as the Kraken, has been the subject of much speculation and occasionally inspiration (viz, 20000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Vernse). An elusive denizen of the deep, mankind has only come to know them by their remains - bony beaks in the stomachs of sperm whales and battle scars on the hides of the same the size of dinner plates and dead specimins up to sixty feet in length caught in fishing nets or washed up on shore. Not too long ago, however, Japanese researchers managed to photograph a live giant squid feeding. The photographs are awesome, to say the least.. they baited a nasty looking deep sea fishing hook with bags of mashed shrimp, attached an automatic camera to the line, and let it drift on a buoy for some period of time, placing the bait some 2950 feet below the surface. At some point, a live specimen estimated at 25 feet in length attacked, tangling and consuming the bait packs in its tentacles and even snagging itself on the hook. Over 500 images were taken before the specimin of architeuthis escaped, tearing off the trailing portion of one of its feeding tentacles to do so. The tentacle segment was recovered by the scientists, who were surprised to find that the tentacle was still alive and trying to move around, which is common in cephalopods due to the highly distributed nature of their nervous systems. While giant squid are deep water creatures, at night they are known to rise to a depth of between 1300 and 1600 feet to feed (converted from the metric for consistency).
Self-replicating code is always a dicey thing.. it can quickly get out of hand and render its environment unusable. Virus authors have known this for years. Patches to distributed systems that involve self-replicating code also fall into this category, as fans of The Sims 2 found out a few years ago and World of Warcraft found out a few days ago. One of the quests involved kililng an enemy called Hakkar, who cursed characters with a plague called Corrupted Blood. This plague, once released into the game environment, spread from character to character like wildfire. Death in WoW is temporary, but it's still a hassle to deal with. Some of the more malicious players of the game have found ways of transporting this plague into highly populous sectors of the game environment, which left several cities all but uninhabitable. There is also no actual cure for this plague.. Blizzard technicians have been trying to eradicate caches of infectious code from the game world and have even gone so far as to reboot entire sectors but their countermeasures have been ineffective thus far.
Celebrate Banned Books Week, 24 September through 1 October 2005.
If it's not the MPAA it's the FCC playing games, this time expanding CALEA to include ISPs and voice-over-IP companies. CALEA (Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act) requires telecommunication companies to make it possible for law enforcement agencies to wiretap calls in a manner completely transparent to the people talking on a given link. The FCC is trying to require ISPs to make it possible to trace and monitor the usage of any of their customers at any time, as well as requiring voice-over-IP companies to make it possible to tap any and all communications made using their service. The EFF is planning to challenge this in court. The deadline for implementation of CALEA compliance is May of 2007. Part of the problem is that because there are so many services offered by every connectivity provider, which providers are beholden to comply? Are individual ISPs required to do so, because their users might be using VoIP? The big VoIP providers, like Skype, certainly are. The document, interestingly, says that any service that can provide 200kpbs upload or download are covered, which is part of the problem because Wi-Fi hotspots, such as those at Starbucks, fit the bill.
The original CALEA specifically states that online information services are NOT covered by this law. The confusion isn't helping any.
Didn't I read something about this in Pattern Recognition by William Gibson?
Oh, here is more on the addenda that the MPAA is trying to sneak through Congress.
Maddox on the Hot Coffee mod for GTA: San Andreas.
Genetic analysis provides the strongest evidence for evolutionary science yet: Once genomes (say, chimpanzees and humans) are sequenced, it's possible to diff them to see how different they really are. In the example just given, there is only about 4% difference between chimps and humans. Most of the genes are exactly the same.. this also makes mathematical modelling possible to figure out the number of mutations possible when you compare one genome to another, because the underlying principles of genetics are the same regardless of the species. The numbers match the hypotheses created using the principles put forth in evolutionary theory.
The battle rages on....
The Motion Picture Association of America is still at it. After several defeats in Congress of their demands to severely restrict what may and may not be digitally recorded, they're trying again sneak it through. This time, they have written a few amendments to a reconciliation bill that'll be going before Congress late in October. This bill actually has something to do with digital television, so it is highly unlikely that it can be halted at the last minute by the Byrd Rule, which allows clauses to be removed from reconciliation bills if they don't actually have anything to do with government cuts. This bill will contain a few clauses that will require another bill to complete.. the broadcast flag bill, once again. Read this article: It comes off as being hypothetical (and needlessly so, I think) but it's a good heads-up of what the MPAA is trying to pull off. They're getting sneakier and sneakier.
With everything going on these days, and all hell breaking loose, this is very sound advice.
What a weekend, but a good one.
Saturday was spent running around for the most part, first going out for lunch, then going to the mall to wander around a bit. Lyssa was given money for her birthday by her family, so she decided to treat herself to a trip to the hair salon and some new work clothes. While she was at the salon, I wandered around some more, learning how the mall is laid out, and stopped in to pick up a copy of the 'documentary' on dragons that the Discovery Channel made earlier this year. Lyssa loved it when it was on TV, and I thought I'd surprise her. After meeting back up (which involved my winding up on the wrong floor of the mall, which I've concluded was modelled after a Quake 3 level) we headed home by way of the Italian Oven for her birthday dinner. That night, I have her one of her gifts early, a skirt that she'd been eyeing for weeks. I left the other two hidden for yesterday.
The general gameplan was that we were going to put a crew together on Saturday night to go clubbing (no lightswitch techno jokes, please). While getting dressed, we recieved two phone calls, one from Hasufin, who was bowing out because he had to get up early the next day, and one from Rhianna, who was stuck on the beltway with a flat tire and no way to change it. I called Hasufin back up, changed my clothes, swung past Hasufin's apartment to pick up both Hasufin and Mika, and then hit the beltway. We found Rhianna's car by the side of the highway and the three of us changed the tire in less than ten minutes, easily. Mika rode shotgun with Rhianna on the way home (because her spare is rated for at most 50 miles at 50 miles per hour; for reference, speeds in excess of 65 miles per hour are normal on the beltway) while Hasufin and I followed her with my car's four way flashers going (standard procedure for driving a car going slower than the extant speed). At one point, we saw something go sailing from Rhianna's car and explode into a shower of sparks on the tarmac, but found out after a phone call that Mika had pitched a not-quite-done cigarette from the window, which resulted in the fireball.
Once back home, I dropped off Mika and Hasufin, then changed back into club gear (consisting of leather jeans and jacket, and mesh t-shirt; this will be important to note later). The grease and metal particles on my hands, even after scrubbing them off, made me loath to wear contact lenses that night (but this is incidental).
The trip to southeast Washington, DC was once again an adventure. A missed exit left us circling around the entire city on route 66, which actually deposited us one mile from home... yes, it took over an hour to actually reach downtown DC, but twenty minutes to get back to our neighborhood via a back highway. I plan on mapping and exploiting this anomaly in the layout of the road system in the future. By doubling back, however, we got back on track in not much more time, and presently found chiarOscuro.
En route, we happened to drive past the location of the protests this weekend, and were surprised by what we saw. The cars parked along the sides of the road in the tunnels was unusual: They were parked along a blind curve in the tunnel (which runs under a building - I don't remember which it was, but it was a US government agency (not one of the TLAs, though)). There also seemed to be more police cars parked along the sides of the streets than other cars. We counted one police car (manned) in every other parking space. More police were stationed at each corner, and most interestingly, there were US Army MPs (military police) stationed along the sidewalks.
Lost as we were, we felt no particular need to stop and ask them for directions. A car full of odd looking folks dressed all in black driving around seemingly aimlessly in a secured area would be suspicious to anyone. We also had no idea of how stressed out these folks were, and as such didn't want to annoy them any more than we had to. I'm wishing that I'd brought at least one of my RF scanners with me to listening to what was going on that night.
Another minor bit of excitement was getting lost in the outskirts of the Pentagon parking lot (which were under surveillance but not secured as the closer reaches were, as demarcated by concrete barriers, orange cones, and warning tape) as we picked our way toward route 66. Thankfully, nothing came of this.
Unfortunately, we missed Arcane Matt's set that night, because he'd been given an earlier time for chiarOscuro's second anniversary celebration. We did manage to run into both Arcane Matt and Adam Rixey, another Pittsburgh escapee. Introductions were made and we spent some time hanging out and catching up on old times.
Lyssa noticed something last night: Even if I know someone, I'm not very likely to go up to them and say 'hi'. Part of this is because there are degrees of knowing someone, and unless I spend a lot of time with them anyway, I'm skittish around most people. Even though I know Matt and Adam from back in Pittsburgh, I don't really know them all that well, certainly not well enough to call them up and invite them to go out for a cup of coffee. I'm also not very inclined to ask someone that I've just met (for example, DJ Skunque at chiarOscuro) because, well... I've just met them. I don't read people very well, especially someone's comfort level with other folks. In a nutshell, I don't want to be "that guy" that everyone finds unnerving somehow...
Okay. Enough digression.
Mental note: I should probably stop putting weird requests in to the DJ booth. I seem to be the only person who's ever heard some of the dance remixes of Cassandra Complex songs (for example), so it's probably pointless to ask for them. I was, however, impressed with the dance remix of Mother Dawn by Billy Idol that was played shortly before we left. Call me crazy, I loved Idol's last album and thought that it was one of the more interesting songs that he ever did.
The mix at chiarOscuro was excellent, as always, and we spent a lot of time on the dance floor enjoying the music. I found out that dancing with large amounts of leather on isn't really a good idea, and even after taking my coat off I still had to stop pretty frequently from dizziness. Not only am I out of shape, but I was probably edging toward heat stroke, on top of that. Aside from the odd wobble because my body's leg muscles weren't working quite right, I was all right the next day.
Somehow, we made it home in relatively good time, and after inflating the Air Mattress of Unusual Comfort, everyone crashed for the night.
Rhianna, you still have one of my t-shirts, by the way.
To thank us for helping the night before, Rhianna took Lyssa and I to breakfast on Sunday afternoon (I say afternoon because we all slept in quite late). Kash arrived earlier that afternoon, and after his arrival we dropped Rhianna's car off at a local garage and headed to the Silver Diner. The afternoon turned into one of those "lunch and talking shop" afternoons, where we talked about most anything under the sun, from 9/11 to Katrina, from mysticism to unknowability. When the.Silicon.Dragon arrived, we started to discuss the protests this weekend, and it took off from there...
We finally left the Diner around 1530 EDT. I dropped Rhianna off at the garage to get her car and then joined Lyssa, Kash, and Lauren (who'd met them earlier) at the garden shop to nose around the houseplants. Lyssa picked up stuff to transplant a few plants while I found a small grafted cactus which I'm going to keep in my office.
Interesting factoid for the day: It's possible to graft pieces of dissimiliar species of cactus to one another, which produces a Frankenstein-like hybrid. For example, you can cut the brightly-coloured top off of one cactus and the top of a rather plain cactus off, and switch the two (using candle wax and cotton gauze to secure them), and with a little luck and a little care, you'll have transplanted chunks of a cactus. I've not done it myself but I read a book on it when I was quite small, and remembered the basics of the procedure for some odd reason. I wasn't able to pass by one of these oddballs in the store. I've decided to name it Mandelbrot, after the fractal, because the top of the cactus resembles, in some ways, a Mandelbrot fractal. I'll take a picture or two later and post it.
Lyssa repotted the spider and purple passion plants on the balcony with the supplies we'd picked up earlier. Following that, we got dressed to drive to the Borders at Bailey's Crossroads for the Neil Gaiman book signing. Neil Gaiman, if you're not familiar with him, was the mastermind behind such comic series as Sandman and Books of Magic, as well as a number of novels, like Neverwhere and American Gods. He's doing a book signing tour right now for his latest novel, Anansi Boys, and the tour happened to take him through Virginia. Lyssa and I quickly put the word out and plans to attend were made. Line order tickets went up for distribution at 1730 EDT yesterday, and the reading/Q&A session started at 1900 EDT. Only Lyssa, Kash, and I were able to attend,' unfortunately, but we were part of a standing room only crowd that had invaded Borders. Folks of all ages, from freshmen in high school to folks my parent's age were in attendence. The goth contingent was well represnted, as were folks who'd been to the renfaire earlier that day and even a few cosplayers. We ran into a Delerium, a Destiny, and Door from Neverwhere, and later in the night a Gothic Lolita interpretation of Death. Neil was greeted by thunderous applause as he walked into the cafe' (which was closed for the book reading) and immediately took command of the crowd with his trademark wit, launching into a recount of some of the events of his book tour and a visit to CBGB's in New York state. He read a short portion of Anansi Boys and then began to take questions. He admitted to writing a biographical book of the band Duran Duran back in the 80's (the one published by the long-defunct Proteus Books with the nifty cover) and related the origins of one of the short stories that he'd written a while back that had to do with Hollywood. All told, he was up there for about 45 minutes before retreating to the top floor for the signing.
Ordinarily, people are called upstairs in blocks of 50 or so to meet authors in attendence. This time, he asked that women with small children and pregnant women be allowed to go up first to make things easier on them. That's the first time that I've ever heard of an author asking for such a thing. That impressed me.
Lyssa, Kash, and I wound up killing time on the bottom floor by talking comics, cryptozoology, and giant movie monsters with the Borders staff on duty at the bottom of the staircase and sundry other folks standing around. It was a good time which only got better when we were called upstairs. The line was around the perimeter of the top floor though very orderly and quiet. Again, we wound up in a fan discussion with some grad students from Philadelphia and generally waited calmly until our turn came. Lyssa went first, overjoyed at getting to meet Neil Gaiman for the first time. She brought one of Neil's more scholarly texts and books of poetry to be autographed, as well as her copy of Anansi Boys and the portrait of Dream and Titania. Her hands were shaking as they spoke; he signed one of her books as a birthday greeting as one of the Borders folks took a photograph of them. When my turn came, I presented my own copy of Anansi Boys along with The Dream Hunters and American Gods. We spoke briefly, informally, quietly.. for lack of anything else to say (what does one say?) I asked him how the tour was going, how he enjoyed DC and Virginia, how he was doing... Neil is a very warm, very personable individual. He has this quality about him that puts you at ease. It is said by Gaiman fans that he's a nice guy and very down to earth, but it's another to actually talk to him and experience it for yourself. I'm not sure of how else to describe it.
Unfortunately, my digital camera's batteries were drained, leaving me with my camera phone only. The pictures taken wtih it aren't very clear, regrettably, but I'll get them up as soon as I can. There are two pictures of me with Neil, and another two or three that I took from the crowd.
Regrettably, Hasufin and Mika were not able to join us last night.
After the three of us stopped off at home to drop off our autographs, we headed out to Amphora for a late dinner to unwind and then returned home around 0100 EDT today. I went to bed because I have work today; Lyssa's off today, pending her first day at IBM tomorrow. Kash left somewhen around 0500 EDT to get back to Maryland in time for class.
If this is true, it surprises me little.
Even though this site pushes the backup utility called Veracity, there are still words of wisdom here.
Great Britain is planning to pull out of Iraq, tentatively scheduled for May of 2006. And what were those British guys doing in Iraq, anyway?
Does it bother anyone else that George W. Bush is talking about putting the military in charge of disaster relief across the country?
Attention, BitTorrent users: Avoid these trackers!
John C. Lilly is probably not pleased with this, wherever he is. Hurricane Rita allowed a number of dolphins trained by the US Navy to escape. These dolphins might be armed with dartguns - they were part of an experiment to train dolphins to serve as antipersonnel weapons.
A bill will be going before the House of Representatives soon that will require everyone detained by federal authorities to provide an archival DNA sample. This is beyond what the law allows now, which is that only people who are convicted of a crime must provide such a sample. The bill, as it is written right now, does not provide for samples from acquitted people to be destroyed afterward.
Two things bother me about what these folks did. One, it seems very patronising. Two, nailing the name of someone to a crucifix could be construed as a symbolic execution or sacrifice (given what the crucifix was used for).
Maybe it's just me.
Don Adams, famous for his role as Agent 86 in the television series Get Smart, dead of a lung infection at age 82.
Cindy Sheehan was arrested this weekend for demonstrating without a permit. I was under the impression that having over one hundred thousand protestors in one place at one time demanded having a permit.. time to social engineer city hall and see if I can get some answers.
| You Are a Visionary Soul |
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Folks who live in the DC metropolitan area: The military folks you might see running around are not your imagination, they are part of something called the Granite Shadow drill. Granite Shadow is a dry run for the military to better prepare them for operations within the borders of the United States in the event that weapons of mass destruction are detected in deployment. While the name itself isn't classified, the nature of the operation is still classified (Top Secret SPECAT, actually). Operation Granite Shadow is being run out of NORAD, the military installation in Colorado made famous in the movie Wargames. George W. Bush has already headed to NORAD for this operation.
While we're talking about the US military, their chaplains are exorcising buildings in NOLA now. I guess all the voudoun mojo down there keeps them up at night. Way to help refugees, folks....
One thing about spirits and the like - they're very literal minded. The chaplain's quoted command "In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you Satan to leave the dark areas of this building" would probably only tell entities answering to that name to leave. I somehow doubt that the Loa, for example, would listen, unless the priest worked up one hell of a lot of mojo to do the job right, which I also doubt.
My ten cents, adjusted for inflation. I work with constructs more than I do with mostly-autonomous entities.
A fourteen year old girl was expelled from school because her parents are lesbians.
Busted... on nothing at all. It's not just the US.
Last night, Grant (Lyssa's brother) and I took Lyssa out to dinner for her birthday. A while ago, Lyssa had gone to a Brasilian bar-be-cue restaurant called the Malibu Grill Steak House, which she'd grown fond of. After finding another one in Virginia, she asked to go there.
The particular Malibu Steak House we went to is located at 4615 Fair Knoll Drive, Fairfax, Virginia, 22033, 703-222-5555. This is important to know, for reasons which I am about to divulge.
The restaurant sucks. The food was bad.. no two ways about it. The hot bar/salad bar's fare is mediocre at best. The french fries are tasty with large amounts of salt or Old Bay Spice, but best serve as filler for your stomach if you plan on having a beer. The various meat cuts at the hot bar are similiarly bad. I nearly broke a tooth on what I thought was a piece of steak, but turned out to be a bone with a thin covering of crisped gristle(!) that happened to look like steak. The salad fare blew hamsters. The service was good and friendly, but really the only thing good from them was the grilled sausage. The lamb was overcooked and tough to cut, the chicken was more gristle than meat, and the steak cuts were dry and tasteless. The only good thing I got there was a glass of Dos Equis beer on tap.
It was far from worth the $62us (!!) we paid for the three of us.
I give the Malibu Grill Steak House in Fairfax, Virginia four flare guns, and that's only because the service was good. Do NOT go here under any circumstances!
The three of us decided to make up for a waste of money by going to a small French cafe' a block away for dessert, whereupon we had a small chocolate tart, a piece of cheesecake, and a piece of chocolate cake with coffee and hot chocolate au mint (total, mind you). The prices were excellent (I think we paid a total of $20us for gourmet food, and damn fine food at that), and well worth the wait. After that we headed to Borders to wander around a bit and see how things were getting set up for the Neil Gaiman book signing on Sunday. I picked up a trade paperback copy of American Gods, because I haven't read it yet, and I'll be getting a copy of his new novel, Anansi Boys the day of the signing (because there's a raffle for a very rare Sandman statue if you buy a copy of the book on the day of the signing), probably earlier that day if I can manage it.
After returning home, the three of us spent some timet trying to figure out what was wrong with Alphonse, who's been acting up for about a day or so, ever since we opened his chassis up to blow an incredible amount of cruft out with compressed air. As it turns out, the enter key of the numeric keypad on his console was stuck, so the constant stream of carriage returns was triggering anything and everything under the sun. After prying the key up, the problems ceased. Next stop: New keyboard.
Remember the two British operatives who were rescued a few days ago? More news has come out... the 'military vehicle' they were in was a car with a cache of disguises, machine guns, anti-tank weapons, and a medical kit.. standard SAS (British special forces) gear for a field op. Interestingly, though they were arested by Iraqi police, they were handed over to the Iraqi military. They were also caught at ground zero of the ruckus minutes before, where Iraqi police officers had been shot at from the crowd. Those guys were in a hell of a big hurry to get out of there not long after the gunshots stopped... most interesting. The news article has a good photograph of what the SAS officers were wearing when they were arrested: Wigs, turbans, and clothing consistent with what Joe Sixpack in that area would wear. Most curious.
Regular readers of mine know that this is something I actively track in the media, the deployment of sonic weapons by local police departments. This article is interesting because it states that they're already in deployment in Iraq and in NOLA (by the US) and something similiar is in use in Jerusalem to break up protests. Here is a photograph of one of the portable units in NOLA (the white hexagonal device next to the soldier on top of the Humvee). Here is a photo set of the portable and non-portable versions of these sonic weapons from the demo at Edwards Air Force Base a few weeks ago. The reason I'm mentioning this is because some of my friends and associates on the Eastern Seaboard are coming to Washington, DC to the Operation Ceasfire protest, starting on 24 September 2005 (that's tomorrow), and word has been out for a while that such devices are being planned for use in the US to break up protests. If anyone attends the protests this weekend and you happen to see these devices set up around the area, please take photographs or video recordings for me so I can put them out there.
The other thing that gets me is this memo from a friend in downtown DC about the IMF/World Bank 2005 meeting soon. Reliable sources have reported Secret Service agents already making preparations for the meeting and planned protests, and the security teams of various office buildings are also preparing at this time. The Secret Service is expecting between 65k and 110k anti-war protestors, with associated overloads of both the metro system and the (already messed up) roads. The US Park Police has warned that "Anarchist bands are expected to perform at the anti-war concert". Something called the MPD (Metropolitan Police Department?) SOD will be deploying every Civil Disturbance Unit Officer they've got. It is also stated that there will be roughly 1.5k protestors staging a civil disorder protest (whatever that means - could they mean the Black Bloc?) and having staged arrests (they'll be trying to get themselves arrested? they are the designated arrestees?). The memo goes on to describe which streets will be closed down and where. The memo even lists many of the organised groups that will be attending, including the Mobilisation for Global Justice, United For Peace, Code Pink, CAGE, and the DCRMC.
Watch your backs, people.
Hurricane Rita's getting closer to Texas and people are already evacuating. The Texas Department of Transportation was dragging its feet on opening up highway I-45 north yesterday, but they eventually converted it into eight lanes heading northward out of the city of Houston. Chaobell (of /usr/bin/w00t fame) is on her way northward at this time and covering it as she goes.
Good luck, Chaobell.
Hurricane Rita has the Red Cross on the ropes. They are at this time pulling out the resources they can from NOLA and moving them to Texas in preparation.
The levee protecting the ninth ward in Louisiana broke this morning. Dozens of blocks that were pumped out are now back under water.
Acer has been manufacturing laptops that are secured with smart cards for a while now. The reasoning behind it is that you can't access the laptop unless you have your smart card jacked into a reader in the side (nevermind the fact that if someone actually nicks your laptop, these security measures are for nothing because you can just pull the hard drive, plug it into another system, and pull the data off of it, anyway). A company called 360 Degree manufactured this system.. but it's been broken already. All you have to do is coax Windows to give you access to the desktop for but a moment, and any windows you spawn in that tiny period of time are accessible to the user even if the smart card isn't plugged in. Two techniques for getting around the smart card protection system are provided here, one for the Acer TravelMate C300 laptop, and one for the Acer TravelMate 8100 (both running Windows XP).
Now the vulnerabilities in the MD5 algorithm are no longer academic, someone's made them practical and published the source code to do it reliably. Microsoft is at this time forbidding the use of the DES, MD4, MD5, and SHA1 (under certain circumstances) algorithms in their software.. which leaves them with what, exactly? SHA-0 (which has its own vulnerabilities, let's not forget). The article has a full brain dump on what it is and how to exploit it.
Hee hee hee... Duck Hunt and Doom - together at last.
Boing Boing has an article up that collects near-realtime Hurricane Rita updates. Check them out - they'll be useful soon.
Guess what? It's now illegal to swear at a TSA employee in the airport, or you can be arrested and fined for interfering with their work. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the First Amendment does not apply to communicating with TSA employees. An irate traveller went off on a screener, claiming that the screener should live in a bubble because the traveller lived in a free country, so the screener shut down his line and called his supervisor.
Download your copy of the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents. I've mirrored it here.
Remember that scene cut from the movie Aliens where Hicks sets up those robotic miniguns to fend off a wave of xenomorphs charging the Colonial Marines at the base? Well, probably not, because it was cut after all, but it's in the novel and the special edition DVD release of the movie, but I digress... someone built one using a pellet gun, a webcam, a few servomotors purchased on the open market, and a single-board servocontroller. Images from the aiming software's point of view are included on this page. Now this is what I call that a good hack.
Electronic warfare is taken to the next level with the development of anti-satellite jamming technologies. The US probably isn't the only country that's deployed this technology to date, but they're not saying which other countries have done so.
Last night I got home from work later than expected because I stayed late to print out documents that Lyssa needed to start work at IBM next week. They had to be in by the end of business today, and we didn't have time to drive back to downtown DC to get them, so the next best thing to do was download them from the company's website, print them out, fill them out, and fax them in. This actually didn't take very long, but getting stuck in traffic was inevitable. Following dinner and a few loads of laundry Lyssa went to take a nap while Hasufin and I drove to the mall to help him pick out a new suit to wear on the business trip he'll be leaving for in a few days. Hecht's is running its summer line blowout right now, so he found two sports coats for a song, one a conventional greyish-green with a pattern, the other a white cotton suit coat straight off the set of Miami Vice.
The latter was the one he'd worn to show Lyssa when we got back. Her reaction was priceless.
Filling out the documents didn't actually take very long. Faxing them did because none of us are sure if Hasufin's fax machine requires documents to be face up or face down... the stack made two trips through the machine, one each way, just to be safe.
While Lyssa was filling out paperwork last night I spent some time balancing my chequebook, and discovered an anomaly - about two months ago my finances went to hell in a handbasket because I'd lost money somewhere. Reconciling the past few statements with my written records (transcribed from the stacks of receipts that I compulsively archive in case I get audited again) shows that everything is present and accounted for.
Chaobell put it best in /usr/bin/w00t: "...the hell?!"
I don't know. Everything seems to balance out these days. I'm even ahead of the game for the first time since I got down here, which I'm very relieved to discover.
Hurricane Rita, successor to Katrina, is headed straight for Texas and it is now considered a category 5 hurricane, the third strongest in the history of the United States. Winds have been clocked at 175 miles per hour, and even the windstorms at the periphery are easily tropical storm-strength. The projected area of landfall is Galveston, Texas late Friday or early Saturday. Over one million Texans have been urged to head inland. The largest energy company in the US, Valero energy, is mothballing its oil derricks to weather the storm. George W. Bush, either learning from the massive fuck ups with Katrina (that, or his advisors have) has pre-emptively declared a state of emergency in Texas and Louisiana. FEMA is reported to have gotten off of its collective ass and put supplies and personnel in ready mode in Florida and Texas.
It figures that the states the Bush family has the most power in would get ready in such a big hurry.
This squicks me in how jaded we've become. An airliner run by johnny-come-lately JetBlue circled Los Angeles, California for three hours last night, unable to land because the landing gear in the nose of the plane was so damaged that the wheel was at a ninety degree angle. KCBS-TV of Los Angeles covered the event as it unfoled... and the passengers aboard the airliner watched the coverage from the television sets embedded in the backs of the seats in front of them.
I suppose if there's nothing that you can do but wait, you may as well try to find out more about what's going on, but still... this disturbs me.
Never, ever use an insecure public terminal!
It looks as if Dell wants to give the iPod Shuffle a run for its money with the DJ Ditty.
Sick and tired of trying to fight your way through an IVR (telephone customer management) system to get to a human? Look up the company you're dealing with in the Find-A-Human database. Folks who have already done so have left instructions to get you there faster.
Criticism can piss off people in a position to put you in a world of hurt - always remember that. In Canada, newspaper columnist Kerry Diotte was stalked by the Edmonton, Canada police force because they took offense at his articles which harshly criticised their photo/radar systems, stating that they did little to actually stop traffic law violations. On 18 November 2004, acting on information that they'd gotten from confidential police databases of automobile drivers, they staked out a bar called the Overtime. Their plan was that by using the information they'd colleted on Diotte (descriptions of his vehicle and home), they'd watch out specifically for his car during a sobriety checkpoint sweep by adding him to a list of "the top 100 aggressive drivers", which is a nice way of saying that they'd find a reason to arrest him, be it driving under the influence or otherwise. They even had an informant inside the bar contact the police to move in and arrest the journalist after his arrival at the Overtime Bar that night.
Perhaps twigged by someone at the bar, perhaps simply being cautious, perhaps this was his usual MO, he called a cab to take him home.
Sergeant William Newton, who ordered the op, faces disciplinary action for abusing his authority.
It looks like VR as a technology isn't quite dead yet.. the VirtuSphere is a hollow metal mesh sphere that allows a user to wander around in VR freely by letting them stand upright and walk around as the sphere rotates around the user, giving the kinesthetic illusion of movement. Nifty.
After we got home tonight, Lyssa and I made pork fried rice for dinner. I finally got to show off my rice steamer, and used chicken broth and some of the (huge) supply of rice that I'd brought with me from Pittsburgh. While I got the rice cooker going Lyssa carved up and stir-fried the pork chops that have been defrosting in the fridge for the past day or so (and lately in the sink, in a bath of warm water). It turned out very well; I'd forgotten how good pork was when made properly.
After dinner I decided to relax on the balcony with a rare treat: A cigar. Earlier this week, Lyssa picked one up for me, and I'd been saving it for an opportunity to sit and think for a while. I'd forgotten how rough cigar smoke can be on soft tissues, in particular those of the mouth. While I love the taste of a good cigar, they're still pretty harsh. Also, the toxins in tobacco smoke are much more pronounced in cigars than in cigarettes, so if you want to preserve a small measure of your sense of taste for any length of time, you have to keep spitting to get them out of your mouth, which is disgusting in and of itself. This is another reason I smoke them only rarely. Third, if I smoke one for too long I start getting sick to my stomach, as I am right now. I don't know if it was some of the tobacco juice that I swallowed without thinking or the higher levels of $TOXIC_COMPOUND in my body or what, but my body feels pretty queasy right now.
Further agenda for tonight: A third tooth-brushing and another bottle of Listerine.
Friday, 23 September 2005 is National Bisexuality Day.
Lyssa's birth certificate arrived today via Federal Express. Next stop: The Virginia DMV.
If you're trying to get out of Houston, Texas to evacuate but you don't want to get stuck in the I-45 traffic jam, here's a back way out of the area. Thanks to Pace for spreading this one around.
Long night, last night.
Because Lyssa had the day off yesterday I didn't have to pick her up after work, so I did a little running around last night. I found a good surplus store not too far away from work and checked out their stocks of verious things. They've got lots of good stuff, and a good selection of books, on top of that. I'm definitely going to pay them a visit in the near future. I also found Big Planet Comics and poked around in there a little. They've got good collections of trade paperbacks, including Grant Morrison's The Invisibles (including Disinfo's concordnance to the series). Later last night, Lyssa and I did some basic maintenance on Alphonse, whose cooling fans were thoroughly snarled with sticky black dirt, the same stuff that the exhaust vents are known to spew from time to time.
Yes, we're breathing that crap. I quit smoking for this?
Another set of nasty letters have been sent to building maintenance to not only fix the faucets in the bathroom, but switch the air conditioning system's filters (which I could do if I broke into the locked rooms myself).
Just when you thought it was safe because North Korea had re-signed a nuclear arms agreement they go off the deep end again, this time by saying that the agreement is part of a plot to disarm them so that they can safely be nuked by everyone else.
Okay. Now the alarms inside my head are going off like a pack of locusts trying to sing like Tori Amos. The news about this whole situation is schizophrenic: On one hand, negotiations are going well, the signatures are on the documents where they're supposed to go, all the I's are dotted and the T's are crossed.. and then stuff like this pops up in the newswires (rarely in the US newsfeeds, interestingly enough) and all of a sudden things are (seemingly) back to square one.
A few things could be happening here: The negotiations and agreement process really are that shaky, and setbacks occur just as rapidly as progress is made. Possible, but I doubt the likelihood. Progress is being made but this could just be propaganda, jetwash released by the North Korean government in an attempt to not look like they've just backed down. Again, possible, but it would stand to reason that it would be for the North Korean people only to maintain trust in their government. It is possible that no progress at all was made, and this isn't the jetwash (but the hopeful press releases and articles were bologna). This seems more likely to me, but it's still pretty extreme; that said, I take that hypothesis with a heaping teaspoon of salt. Or maybe things are unfolding just this way, with the North Korean government having flipped its wig and threatening everyone just after signing a peacable agreement.
Not enough information. I wish I could get my hands on transcripts of the proceedings (or better yet, footage) to see for myself.
This just isn't adding up.
Hurricane Rita has the oil companies running for cover. So much for being able to afford gas lately...
A new worm is making its rounds on the Net, and it's one of the most insidious I've seen yet - it alters the system in such a way that it spoofs Google. Specifically, it alters the hosts file buried inside the c:\Windows\System32 directory hierarchy and hardcodes an IP address for many variants of the familiar http://www.google.com/ URL that all go back to a site that looks a lot like Google (and probably uses the Google APIs to pass search requests to the real Google) but has different sponsored links at the tops of the search results returned. This effectively skews web searches in the direction the worm's author(s) wish. The fake Google page is one of the most sophisticated ever seen - it even supports all 17 languages that the real Google does. The worm propagates across peer-to-peer networks, especially Shareaza and Imesh, pretending to be a copy of the game Knights of the Old Republic 2.
Hamster death matches! (probably safe for work, can't say the same about comments because those tend to drift)
And I shall call him.. Mini-MSFT.
Whoever maintains this weblog is walking the razor's edge.. I'm impressed.
I just noticed - not only do I have an office, I have an official Sunrocket nameplate for my office. That is definitely a first.
In other Sunrocket news, Rhianna just started working here this morning.
The RIAA is trying to railroad the FCC to require copy protection on digital radio broadcasts. You can sign the petition against this here.
Well, after better than ten years, it's finally happened. My batman factor inremented yesterday afternoon as I was given my emergency pager. Somehow I've managed to dodge the bullet this long, but my time's come. I scrounged around for a battery for it last night and now it's residing on my belt, next to my Leatherman holster and cellphone.
In an uncharacteristic show of openness about this whole mess, the United Kingdom has admitted to sending a black ops team in to Basara to rescue two undercover agents. Said agents were disguised as Iraqis and were on an undisclosed assignment when they were arrested in a sweep after two British military vehicles were disabled and burned yesterday in the middle of a riot. The operatives weren't found in the jail itself, but the black ops team did find out their location (in a nearby safe house) during the raid, which was then successfully hit.
Al Jazeera has thoughtfully provided pictures of the two agents, which now makes them useless for undercover work.
Research into spinal cord regeneration techniques is advancing nicely. The National Academy of Sciences has reported that mice whose spinal cords were surgically damaged and then implanted with neural-differentiated stem cells from adult humans regained mobility just nine days after the cell implantation procedure. Research is on-going at the University of California at Irvine. The stem cells further differentiated into oligodendrocytes (which produce myelin, the fatty insulation covering of neurons) and new spinal neurons which successfully constructed synaptic connections with existing spinal neurons. The experimental mice are able to not only move their rear halves (presumably; the research would require mice that can still move somewhat, and the back half of the body is an idea place to cut the cord, so to speak) but move their hind paws in a coordinated manner and even walk around. The regenerated neurons were working for four months before they were killed (to provide evidence one way or the other that the implanted cells had a positive effect - remove the patch and see if it crashes again). This is extremely heartening.
Quantum Link: Reloaded made Slashdot today. Their bandwidth is in for one hell of a hit...Lyssa's just had her first run-in with the Virginia DMV today. They turned her away because her birth certificate was written by a hospital and not the state of Pennsylvania. Damn.
I'm really not sure of what to make of the GPX2 yet. It's a hand-held unit, about the size of a Playstation Portable, with a joyknob on the left and a couple of control buttons on the right. It's based on a dual-CPU system. It runs Linux, so they say. Poking around the specs shows that it was designed to play games, music, movies, and act as an e-book reader. It's also supposed to
