2006/03/01

Yesterday's installment of the SANS Handler's Diary pretty much says it all.. a professor at an American university that they're declining to name has assigned to his or her students the reconaissance and penetration of a computer system Out There Somewhere, which is illegal in the US unless you've got the proper permission, contracts, flaming hoops, legal team, and whatnot. Moreover, the university in question has stated that they will not stop the professor, they just don't want the students going after the university's boxen (and we all know what the security is like on university nets...).

Here's something you don't see every day - a poll was taken of US troops in Iraq at this time and less than 25% agree with what Bush is doing with them.

The Smithsonian Museum of American History is planning an exhibit on the history of hip-hop. Among those who spoke at the announcement were pioneers of the genre, such as Grandmaster Flash. The exhibit will feature artifacts of the evolution of hip-hop, such as Grandmaster Flash's original turntables, MC Lyte's diary, a poster announcing the release of the album New Jack Hustler by Ice-T, and Afrika Bambaataa's famous Marcus Garvey leather jacket. Mind you, these were on display at the announcement only.. much more will be on display at the exhibit itself.

I want one of these.

Choose Your Own Adventure book cover photoshopping contest (some stuff not safe for work).

This is pretty cool.. a lock that uses a key without a keyhole. Following the methodology of "something you know and something that you physically have" of authentication, the E-Lock company of Israel has developed a lock that responds to a series of knocking sounds as its key. The idea is that you press a small device to the door itself (which doesn't have a keyhole, and might not even have a handle) and type a code into it. The device then emits into the door a pattern of knocking sounds, which the lock picks up, interprets, and decides whether or not to unlock.

This is very, very sad... in response to the law recently passed in South Dakota that would ban abortion, someone has posted a do-it-yourself abortion manual to her weblog.

Last night to celebrate Fat Tuesday, Lyssa and I found ourselves craving fine Indian food at what could be our new favourite restaurant, Aarathi Indian Cuisine (409 Maple Avenue East; Vienna, Virginia, 22180; 703-938-0100). There we once again partook of a simply fantastic meal, from cardamom tea to rice pudding and tasty sweet curries in between. Truth be told, two different kinds of bread were a bit much and we felt it most of last night.. but some days you need curry.

2006/02/28

Wow... a first look at Microsoft's Project: Origami, which appears to be a miniature tablet PC. The unit's announced features include pen or keyboard input, the ability to plug USB devices in, wireless networking, multimedia, and GPS. Doesn't that sound familiar, modulo the USB support?

Something strange is going on in Australia - schools will be ordered to disconnect their net.links unless each one pays the Australian Copyright Collection Society every time a student is told to browse a website, stating that they are collecting royalties on behalf of the webmasters Out There.

What the hell is this? If you put up a website it's free access for everyone on the Net (well, just about: China, the Middle East, and Scientologists have to filter net.content). There isn't any expectation of royalties unless it's in the terms of service, which most websites don't have or require. Also, I have to ask, what is the "Copyright Collection Society" doing with the money? Giving it to the webmasters out there in payment? Where's my cut of the funds they collect, guys?

"Copyright Collection Society" my rosy red starfish. "Protection racket" is more like it.

Stephen Heller, the whistleblower who broke the case that Alameda County, California was using uncertified voting machines manufactured by Diebold has been brought up on felony charges for illegal access to data, burglary, and recieving stolen property. Two years ago he came across documents while working at law firm Jones Day (which represented Diebold) that stated that using uncertified voting systems constituted a major violation of California election law and that Alameda County could sue Diebold for breach of contract. Moreover, Diebold's legal team was wondering whether or not the secretary of (California) state could investigate them for such allegations. The documents wound up in the hands of the Oakland Tribune and were posted to the newspaper's website in April of 2004; this threw fuel on the fire of controversy because a significant fraction of the voting machines decided to tank on Election Day, which meant that thousands of voters had to be turned away, and about as many had to file paper ballots. An investigation showed that Diebold had sold the systems prior to federal certification, and used software that also had not been certified. That model of voting system was banned from use in May of 2004 as a result.

If Heller is convicted, he faces up to 44 months in prison.

Hearing this gives me geek-wood: The Play Symphony will be having a concert in northern Virginia on 4 August 2006. If you've never heard of them, the Play Symphony is a full orchestra that performs video game music. They are famous for the Final Fantasy orchestral tour of 2005, entitled "More Friends" that left fen weak-kneed and raving for days afterward. During this tour they'll be performing songs from Final Fantasy (surprise, surprise), Metal Gear Solid, Shenmue, Halo, and a couple of other games (check out the website). Tickets for the 4 August 2006 show at the Wolf Trap Filene Centre in Vienna, Virginia are not yet on sale but rest assured I'll let everyone know when they are.. after I reserve my own, of course. The prices of tickets have not yet been announced but I've spoken to a few folks who have picked up the prices for the concerts in Chicago, Illinois, and tickets are between $25us and $125us (the latter includes a meet-and-greet with the composer and performers).

Wow - the FBI's been watching the interrogations going on at Guantanamo Bay, and they're seeing some interesting stuff, such as forcing suspects to watch gay porn under strobe lights ("There.. are.. five.. lights!"), wrapping them in Israeli flags, and refrigerating them.

Here are reasons why you didn't get your flying cars in the year 2000.

Holy shit. MC Hammer has a weblog.

2006/02/27

Another day at work.. I finally got sleep this weekend so my body and mind feel pretty clear this morning. Knock on wood, the day's started off pretty slow, so I'm actually being productive early on a Monday for once.

Start knocking on the nearest wooden object.

The world of science fiction is diminished by the passing of Octavia Butler at the age of 58. Her novels, which are renowned for being fascinating, imaginative, and insightful are known for taking a long, hard look at modern social issues in such a way that people don't know they're modern and automatically close their minds out of political correctness. Ms. Butler died on 24 February 2006 after suffering a fall in her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington state. Ms. Butler, you will be missed...

As if I couldn't be any more cheerful this morning, Don Knotts, remembered for his role as Barney Fife, also died last week of lung cancer at the UCLE Medical Centre in Los Angeles, California at the age of 81.

The US Department of Justice stated that Google's reasons for not handing over web search records were unwarranted, because the records that they are being commanded to hand over contain no personally identifiable information, so no privacy laws would be violated. What they are not saying is that Google's so-called immortal cookie does in fact uniquely identify everyone who hits the Google search engine and accepts the cookie (which just about every web browser out there silently does unless you configure them not to). What they also are not saying is whether or not the DoJ's demanding those cookie records.

I wrote some stuff about this back in January; if you're interested in net.privacy you'll probably want to check it out.

The Defcon 14 call for papers is open.

A new distributed computing project started in January of 2006: Breaking a couple of German messages from World War II that were encrypted with the Enigma device. Enigma was the Allies' name for the German cryptosystem that the Axis was using to protect its top-secret communiques; it was eventually broken by the Allies but not all of the messages were decoded. It is thought that the messages in question haven't been cracked yet. The M4 project came about to set up a distributed processing system that would systematically try every combination of rotors (if you're not familiar with the theory behind the Enigma machine's guts check this page out) in a smart way. The idea is that you download an open source client written in Python and run it on your machine and it goes out to grab bundles of keys to try, does its thing, and uploads the results to the M4 project. This isn't too different from the methods used by distributed.net, SETI@home, and The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search in theory, though in practise it does something very different.

If you've been in the hospital for surgery of some kind in the past couple of years, this should give you pause - the proprietors of the Daniel George & Son funeral home of Brooklyn, New York were busted for selling cadaver tissue on the black market. They had installed a hidden operating theatre in their funeral home, where they harvested cartilage, skin, bone, and other hardy tissues from corpses that moved through their home and sold them to a shell company, which then resold them on the open market for surgical transplanation. They replaced what they took with all manner of materials, from lengths of plumbing pipe to the surgical drapes and gowns they wore while chopping the bodies up to give them the basic appearance of wholeness. Last week the proprietors of the funeral home along with a former dentist named Michael Mastromarino and Joseph Nicelli with selling tissues of questionable quality (the death certificates of some bodies were faked such that they didn't show up as having been sick or very old when they died), graverobbing, grand larceny, racketeering, and other crimes, racking up 122 counts in all. People that have recieved tissue grafts in the past couple of years are lining up to get legal representation in case they recieved infected tissues (note that it's the responsibility of the tissue harvesting company to ensure that the bodies are healthy (modulo death) before consideration for harvesting)...

Just when you thought that stuff like this only existed in cyberpunk novels..

Speaking of stuff in cyberpunk novels, who really thought that TIA (Total/Terrorist Information Awareness) project was really spiked back in 2002? It's come out that they just split the various projects up and renamed them - funding and work on them never ceased. Data mining research was moved to other bodies that are unaffiliated with the Pentagon. Control of the IAPS (Information Awareness Prototype System) was transferred to NSA HQ, Fort Meade, Maryland from TIA proper under the codename "Basketball", though the contract still belongs to Hicks and Associates of Arlington, Virginia. "Basketball" is supposed to be the component that correlates output from various analysis structures. Another project, originally called "Genoa II", was renamed "Topsail", and placed under the control of ARDA (Advanced Research and Development Activity, NSA HQ, Fort Meade, Maryland). Project Topsail is said to be an umbrella projet under which software that would assist information analysts and policy makers anticipate terrorist acts. Defense contracter SAIC was awarded a $3.7mus contract in October of 2005 to continue development of Project Topsail. Supposedly, early generations of technologies developed by these and other projects were used during the planning of US military operations in Afghanistan and other operations in "the continuing war on terrorism". This is some pretty scary stuff, folks.. check it out when you get the time.

Ever try to file a complaint against the polic? An investigative reporter for the station CBS4 of Miami, Florida did a story on this, and what he discovered was fascinating. Not only was the reporter unable to obtain a complaint form of any kind because all but three of the 38 police stations didn't have any, but after finding out that they'd been recorded by an undercover investigative reporter but he took an incredible amount of flak for it, including an officer preparing to draw his weapon after being pressed to produce a complaint form. The transcripts of the hidden video recordings are very revealing... one of the police departments even took it to court to prevent the original story from being aired.

Morrissey was questioned by the FBI.

Heh heh heh... load this article (SFW) and do a quick find on "GAY ADOPTION". It's amusing.

2006/02/26

Picking up from last night, Lyssa and I woke up aroud 1830 EST and checked our e-mail, and found communiques from Lyssa's brother. As it turns out, he was going to a meetup last night and wanted to see a few friendly faces there, which meant us. Oddly enough, the late 20's/early 30's meetup was going bowling at an alley just a couple of miles away from our apartment complex, so we got dressed and hit the road, searching for the alley.

There is something that you should know about Lee Highway in northern Virginia: It doesn't always go in the directions you think it should. For example, and this is where Lyssa and I kept getting turned around last night, if you want to stay on Lee Highway when it meets up with Old Lee Highway, you should not continue going straight, but get in the rightmost lane and make a hard right - the strip mall with the bowling alley will be on your left in a couple of seconds' time. You actually have to turn into the parking lot to find it, but trust me, it's there.

The meetup was kind of small, about twenty people. I wasn't actually expecting anything because I've never actually been to a meetup. As advertised, it was a bunch of folks in the late 20's or early 30's getting together to hang out and have a good time. I met a couple of folks while I was there, a few other professional geeks in the area. I'm notoriously bad with names so I really don't remember any of the names (I'm pretty sure that one guy was named Kami, and pronounced as part of "Cameron", which is why it sticks out). Lyssa also spoke to a couple of folks while we were there, mostly the same people that I was hanging out with.

I felt of out of place while I was there.. I didn't know anyone, I had just dropped in out of the blue.. it felt very odd. That didn't stop me from bowling a couple of games (I averaged out at about 100, which means that my I haven't lost what little touch for the game I had back in my BBS days). The teams were very lopsided, I noticed (three on one, six on the other), which meant that Lyssa, Kami, and I played two games in the time it took the other folks to play one.

We wound up leaving around 2200 EST last night and decamping to the local IHOP (International House of Pancakes), which is something of a fixture south of the Mason-Dixon Line. It's one of those 24-hour restaurants where you can get breakfast, lunch, or dinner at all hours of the day, and where you can get a bottomless cup of coffee to boot. We hadn't eaten since 1700 EST or so, so we grabbed a bite to eat (Lyssa the short stack of pancakes, myself the basket of chicken strips) and relax.

Because my body's been acting up whenever it doesn't get coffee every day (this is bad.. addiction to anything is unacceptible) I've been detoxing my chassis, drinking more water than usual, trying to get exercise, and cutting back on the amount of coffee that I drink, but as an experiment I decided to order a decanter of decaf along with dinner.

Ugh. It still tastes like chemicals. Still can't stand the stuff.

We noticed something while we were there: Baby bats! Gothlings! Whatever you want to call them, they're the goth-kids too young to go clubbing, so they get dressed and hang out at the local all-night restaurant (Eat and Park used to be my hangout of choice, so don't think I'm standing in a pristine glass house here). For just a second, I felt old, as if I should be holding court (or recruiting an army) or something..

Mental note: Find someplace new to go dancing down here. Since chiarOuscuro tanked, Lyssa and I haven't gone out anywhere.

Well, what do you know.. the Sci-Fi site went live. WARNING: Spoilers on the pages inside the site! If you haven't seen the new series yet, be warned!

2006/02/25

If you've been paying attention to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, then you've probably heard that they still want to bring Forrest County sherriff Billy McGee up on charges because he commandeered an ice truck to distribute water. FEMA, in its infinite wisdom, was sitting around on its collective laurels while people were getting sick and dying, so the sheriff took it upon himself to distribute clean water and ice to the people he is charged with protecting. While not facing jail time, he is facing a fairly hefty fine for doing what FEMA was too brain-dead to do.

So.. what did I do today?

Well, not much of anything. I woke up around 1100 EST this morning because I had been dead-tired from this week. Lyssa had been up for a few hours before me but went back to bed to cuddle my comatose form. I got up, performed basic maintenance, and made myself breakfast, then got dressed and headed out to run around a little while Lyssa stayed at home and worked on her new obsession, knitting.

My first stop was the package place (I've no idea what the real name of it is, it's one of those places where you can mail out packages) and put a couple of birthday gifts in the mail and then hit route 7 to see what I could find. I had an inkling of what I was after (Disinformation: The Complete Series on DVD) but wound up wandering around Tower Records for a good bit of the afternoon. I stumbled across a copy of Echoes and Artifacts, by the Cruxshadows, which I've been meaning to pick up for a while because it has a few of my favourite songs on it, and also found copies of some hard to find magazines that I've been looking for. I was also very surprised to note that they had for sale The Black Flame, which is the biannual magazine of the Church of Satan. That's the last thing I expected to see in a music store around here. The content of issue 16 has some interesting articles in it but not much that I found particularly useful or interesting.

Unfortunately, they didn't have a copy of the Disinformation series in stock, so I took the time to pick up a copy of MIrrormask for Lyssa as a surprise (she's wanted to see it since she first heard about it but I got sick and we missed one of the very few showings down here). After this particular find I checked out and headed for home. I took the opportunity to listen to my new CD in the TARDIS on the way back because I'm normally too busy at work to listen to anything for longer than thirty seconds at a stretch and rolled the windows down to get some fresh air. When I got home Lyssa was busily knitting and watching televion, one of the many so-called "reality TV" shows that are so popular these days (this one on Bravo).

While watching Project Runway Lyssa started making an early dinner of baked polenta while I straightened up a little bit - did the dishes, cleaned up the kitchen, put some magazines away, stuff like that. Lyssa's cooking really shines on the improvised stuff she makes - it's incredible. Polenta, which is corn mush, is really tasty when fried or baked, and comes across a lot like a bread. Try it at least once (especially Lyssa's - tell her I told you so).

We napped for a couple of hours after that, and woke up somewhen around 1830 EST. We crashed hard... I think we're still catching up on our sleep.

This just in: Funimation, the North American anime licensing powerhouse, announced at Megacon that they've licensed the Fullmetal Alchemist movie, titled The Conquerer of Shamballah. Both the movie and the thirteenth DVD of the series will be released in the US on 3 October 2006. No word yet on a theatrical release (hint hint, guys!).

Hey, wait a minute.. October third.. isn't that when Ed and Al burned their house down?

This is truly a wired world.. Livejournal is selling virtual flowers, boxes of chocolate, and balloons. The virtual gifts will exist on the recipient's userinfo page for two weeks before vanishing.

2006/02/24

The National Archives just found out about the reclassification effort.

It seems that the DHS considers bumper stickers evidence of terrorist activity.

You know.. rereading the transcript of the recording that guy made (I bet his supervisor's freaking out over that - data recording devices are verboten in secured government facilities) it reads an awful lot like a gradeschool argument.

2006/02/23

The EFF has posted realtime notes and transcriptions of the WIPO conference, day 2. It would behoove everyone who reads books, watches TV, or listens to music to check out some of the stuff they think is a good idea.

This is pretty cool: Teaching fractals using cornrows as examples.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have been working with very simple quantum computers, and they've made a very strange discovery: You can run a database search algorithm without actually writing a programme to do so. This strange state of affairs is due to the fact that sometimes you can deduce an answer without actually applying a logical method. The photon used to implement the qubit was placed in a superpositional state, in which it was both running and not running a programme called Grover's quantum search algorithm. Interestingly, even when the photon was in the latter state it still revealed the correct answer.

To quote the Principia Discordia, don't look at me, man, I didn't do it.

Is it legal to seize a search engine you don't like, even a private one?

It looks kind of cheesy, but it caught my eye nonetheless this morning: A USB key labelled as one of the HAL-9000's memory units. Personally, I'd much rather go for a USB key a bit more like the ones from the movies (a transparent block of plastic) rather than a little sliver with some silkscreening on it but it still has silly-toy factor.

A 12-year old in Aurora, Illinois was charged with a felony for bringing sugar to school because the cops thought it was cocaine.

2006/02/22

It's snowing this morning... not sure when it started but it was a surprise when Lyssa and I walked out the front door. A quick peek outside around 0645 EST made me think that it was raining and not snowing.. whoops.

The new crown's in place and working out very well. I'm wondering about what the dentist did, exactly, to fine-tune the fit of it, though. More and more, I have misgivings about going to her for dental work. She wants to remove three fillings that I've had for less than a year and fit caps onto the teeth. Not only is that expensive (to have that done is better than $1kus per job, of which I have to pay half) but.. those are new fillings!

She can work on the two molars remaining that don't look so hot (they bother me just about every day) but that's it.

So.. after leaving the Air and Space Museum with Lyssa, Hasufin, Mika, Duo, and Kash, we headed back home to grab dinner on the way.. we wound up going to a middle eastern (Afghani, actually) restaurant called the Panjshir (224 West Maple Avenue; Vienna, Virginia; 22180), which is a little hole-in-the-wall place on Maple Avenue with beautiful interior decoration, a helpful waitstaff, good prices, and good atmosphere. We had to wait a while to be seated because there were so many of us, but the food made it well worth the wait. The food is well priced for folks looking for good fare locally and extremely tasty. The six of us shared what we'd gotten for dinner and were impressed by everything we'd ordered. I highly recommend checking this place out if you're in the area.

After dinner we headed home to meet up with Dilemma and hang around the apartment watching movies. Dilemma was introduced to the crew and we sat down to watch a movie that I've had in my collection for a while but hadn't had a showing of - a Japanese fairytale called Onmyoji. Unfortunately, we watched the dubbed version on the DVD, which I'd never had the heart to watch before. The translations were okay, though some of the nuances were lost and I wasn't too wild about the voices used in the dubbing process. Something that I did notice about the movie that I rather enjoyed was that the chanting performed by the onmyoji (yin-yang sorcerers) in the movie was kept in the original languages.. it didn't sound cheesy at all, but creepy and sorrowful, in a way. If you like fantasy movies, martial arts, anime, or foreign films, at least rent Onmyoji to watch it subbed.

I'm not usre, exactly, when the shindig broke up. After the movie was over Hasufin and Mika quietly excused themselves while Lyssa and Dilemma talked on the couch. Kash and Duo stayed up to crash in the pillow nest and watch Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (fun fact about the movie for you: Even though it's anime, the primary voice track for the movie has always been English and not Japanese, quite the reverse of usual anime). Eventually Dilemma left and Lyssa and I went to bed to catch up on our sleep.

The four of us woke up sometime Sunday morning and set out for the Silver Diner for breakfast to cap off the weekend. Duo and I ordered something the call the Paradise Island French Toast, which includes pan fried bananas and pecans, raspberry syrup, and caramel. They're far from on-plan for any diet out there but they're oh-so tasty, and full of sugar. Parents, don't let your kids have these if you value your sanity.

Regrettably, I had to go to bed early that day, because I had to work the night shift to take care of a few things around the office.. and we all know how well that went.

Kathryn Cramer is picking apart the super-secret DRM technology called VEIL that you can't even get the specs to unless you pay $10kus for it to see what, exactly, they're hiding. Check it out - this is some good investigative blogging.

Samsung is being sued by Disney, Time-Warner, and a few other media companies because they sold some DVD players that ignored region coding back in 2004, which meant that you could order DVDs sold in other countries and watch them successfully. Where they get the whole "allowed unauthorised duplication" thing (it's a DVD player meant for home entertainment centres) is unclear.

You knew this was coming - folks are confessing to damn near anything under torture at Guantanamo Bay just to get it to stop, just like during the Inquisition.

Re-tune your equipment, folks!

You hear about this from time to time in medical journals as a curiosity, but it's pretty rare - a couple of days ago a Russian man had a fatty tumour removed from his back that turned out to be a fetus absorbed while he was still in the womb. From time to time, what should be fraternal or paternal twins will develop in the womb, but they'll collapse together into a single clump of cells. Sometimes you'll hear about surgeons removing a tooth from someplace it doesn't belong, like the sole of a foot, or finding fingernails inside the abdominal cavity during routine surgery or something, but every decade or two something like this pops up.

Interesting.

If you've never heard of The Church of the Subgenius(tm), it's a joke religion that's been around for at least thirty years now. Specifically, it lampoons fundamentalist religion of all kinds, shamanism, and just about everything else under the sun that you can imagine. It's a huge joke centered around Slack - real, hardcore Parker Lewis-style fucking around and coming out on top each and every time. A woman in Texas lost all contact with her son because she's a Subgenius. The story's thirty-seven flavors of screwed up, no lie... and guess what? My fellow Discordians have declared open season on the judge on Jake Day (73rd day of Chaos, otherwise known as 14 March 2006).

I wonder if he likes knock-knock jokes in Esperanto...

2006/02/21

It's been a couple of days.. long, days. Last weekend was wonderful, modulo an emergency page at 0030 EST Saturday morning that kept Lyssa and I at her brother's place untli 0345 EST while I was troubleshooting. The past day has been, in a word, horrific.

The parts in between were great, though. I'll write about them when I get a chance.

Friday after work, Lyssa and Elwing headed out to the local craft store for knitting class, which lasted a couple of hours. I stayed at home around that time with my iPod on and cleaned up the apartment a bit because we'd be having company over that weekend. After they got back we hit the late-Friday road to go to her brother's place to see his new digs and split a pizza for dinner. We wound up hanging out until well after midnight, around which time I recieved an emergency page from work...

You know it had to go downhill from there, right?

The evening culminated in poring over stack dumps and programme traces and having someone drive to the hosting facility to physically pull out a power cord to reset a machine. That wasn't fun.

Lyssa and I eventually got home around 0415 EST on Saturday and went straight to bed. We got up around 1100 EST and went into a mad dash trying to finish cleaning up the apartment. We didn't finish, unfortunately, because Kash and Duo of the Lost Boys arrived somewhen around noon.

There was a mad dash to get everything together in a hell of a big hurry, and as I said before, we didn't finish. Hasufin and Mika arrived shortly therafter, and we got our stuff together to head out to the Air and Space Museum for the afternoon.

On the way there we decided to stop by Wegman's, which is a swanky grocery store with a very tasty (and unusually large) buffet-style restaurant that happened to be along the way. Imagine a smorgasbord the size of a Wal-Mart with food from Whole Paycheque: You've got Wegman's. While the food there is very tasty (especially the Chinese bar), it's also very expensive, on the order of $8us per pound. Your average lunch can easily wind up two pounds in weight or so, because they weigh everything. Lyssa and I each dropped $26us on lunch, which was a lot of money for an average amount of food that you could copare to lunch at Whole Paycheque if it wasn't organic. It really wasn't worth it.

After lunch we piled back into the TARDIS and set out for the Air and Space Museum. Surprisingly, it was pretty easy to find, because I drive past it on my way to the hosting facility from time to time - exits for it are a landmark that I keep an eye open for. I'm not sure how we found parking so fast but I suspect that Mika called in a favour or two from Someone. Anyway, we had to pass through security to get into the museum, which consisted of having our bags (if we had any) searched (they searched my camera bag). I also had to empty the contents of my belt holster for the security guards (consisting of a Leatherman tool; thankfully they didn't notice the haemostats or any of the other implements). The folks there are very geek-friendly, and let me in without having to take anything back to the TARDIS.

The A&SM is built in a plane hangar, which, if you've never been in one, is bloody gigantic. It's easily the size of a football field - it has to be to hold all of the planes therein. They have an SR-71 Blackbird spy plane on display along with a Space Shuttle (that, I am told, is silently being cannabalised for parts), planes from World War I and II, training planes, parts of famous planes, memorabelia from the Space Race up until the 80's.. there's so much in there you'd have to walk around with a tape recorder to get everything down. It's huge. I had my camera with me, and I snapped about sixty pictures while I was there of a fraction of the stuff they had there.

They even have the model of the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind inside a lexan display case. If you look closely, you can see stuff that the designers hid among the nurnies, like a little R2D2, a tiny cemetary plot (with a crucifix mausoleum and four gravestones), a TIE fighter, little groups of model planes (that are supposed to represent the planes the aliens in the movie abducted), and a picket fence (I saw no little white house there).

I'll eventually get the photographs up.

We spent the entire afternoon at the Museum wandering around, taken in by everything on display there. For some odd reason I found myself getting choked up from time to time by certain exhibits. I'm still not sure why. A few of us checked out the simulator rides on the bottom floor, which to be honest aren't really all they're cracked up to be. Skip the simulator rides when you go there, they aren't worth the $7us.

More to come tomorrow.

1001 fun things to do with liquid nitrogen!

So how easy is it, anyway, to wage biowar? This will be of interest to you. At the very least, it can be expensive to pick up the necessary hardware to do it, even on eBay (no, I'm not kidding). The necessary chemicals can also be tricky to get hold of. Once you've got a DNA synthesiser, though, you can plug it into a computer, give it a DNA sequence (Google is your friend - the author found the the gene that codes for Enhanced Cyan Fluorescent Protein on the web), and go to lunch and you'll be able to generate the DNA without too much trouble.

It should be noted that the full DNA sequence for smallpox is also readily available on the web. Getting your bacterial sample to take in the DNA and plug it into its own genome is even easier, you just drip your synthesised DNA into the culture medium. Bacteria use a system called plasmid exchange to swap bits and pieces of DNA for genetic diversity, because single-celled organisms only reproduce by fissioning, which can be likened to a natural cloning process; this same mechanism is used by bacteria to pick up the DNA and integrate it. Some fraction of the culture then starts doing whatever the new DNA tells it to. In the lab, it's not perfect, though... in nature, the plasmids have their own protein coats that faciliate the integration process, something that DNA synthesisers (at least the ones used in this article) don't make.

This just in: The new season of Doctor Who starring David Tennant starts on 15 April 2006. Be sure to stick around home so you can prowl your favourite BitTorrent tracker. Be sure to seed once you're done!

For the past seven years, the US government has been steadily reclassifying information without telling anyone, and yet they're leaving how-to type documentation, such as how to use high explosives properly, untouched.

I had the permanant dental crown installed this morning at the dentist's office. A bit of twisting and turning and grinding was necessary but it went smoothly, and it's doing very well.

It's about bloody time.. a crew of bikers called the Patriot Guard are turning up at the funerals that Fred Phelps and his family protest at. Keep up the good work, folks.

2006/02/17

Charges will not be fired against Dick CHeney for the accidental shooting of his friend a few days ago. I have to agree with this.. shit happens, and I really don't think that it was anything more than your basic screwup. Cheney's probably mortified at what happened.

Let's just let this go.. if sniper rifles or pistol shots to the back of the head were involved, then I'd say to keep up with it.

I was really afraid this would happen: The Senate won't be investigating the warrantless wiretaps by the NSA after all; they also voted against Russ Feingold's bill to limit the powers of the USA PATRIOT Act.

It's finally happened - someone's developed a trojan horse for MacOSX, dubbed Leap-A or Oompa-A. Its propagation vector is the iChat IM system, and it goes to everyone on the user's buddy list. The file needs to be opened/executed by the user that recieves it. When the file is opened it disguises itself as a .jpg file and places the string 'oompa' into the resource fork of infected programmes to prevent multiple infection. Securityfocus also has a writeup on Oompa-A, with links to relevant sites. The trojan tries to disguise itself as a collection of leaked screenshots of the next release of OSX, codenamed Leopard. It doesn't actually harm anything on the system, at least not yet; variants are sure to come. There is a list of FAQs here that OSX users should read.

In the state of North Carolina, the GOP is going around to churches asking for copies of the membership registers to use in voter registration drives. Many churches are refusing, citing privacy.

Guantanamo Bay.

2006/02/16

This isn't a real surprise: Torture at the Abu Ghraib prison is still ongoing. More pictures were leaked. Guantanamo Bay is also back in the news, with fresh allegations of torture. If you'd like to see the proof for yourself you can download the images from any of these BitTorrents. I encourage you to seed after they're done until your share ratio is at least 1.0 (meaning that you've uploaded as much as you downloaded).

The RIAA is now claiming that fair use does not include backing up the software or music that you bought for personal use, entirely in contradiction to US law. Ars Technica has a better article on this matter over here.

I've always suspected that this was possible, but someone's gone ahead and done it: Someone's hacked a serial interface onto a Roomba to turn it into a remotely controllable robot, in addition to its already nifty autonomous control system.

Presenting Psiphon, another software package to help people governed by restrictive regeimes get unfettered access to the Net, from the software labs of the University of Toronto. Psiphon is designed with plausible deniability in mind, so if someone suspects that you're up to something shady they can't prove that you were accessing something that you shouldn't have (like reports of the Tiannamen Square massacre of 1989). It's basically a proxy system that uses encryption to conceal the contents of both the request and the content returned. No logs are kept on the clients or the servers. Port 443/TCP is used, which is the same port used to protect traffic with SSL, which is a must for net.business and banking, so that port can't be blocked out of hand without pissing off most of a country that uses the Net in a serious manner (and who doesn't these days?). Psiphon isn't ready yet, but it's scheduled to be released at the PEN conference in May of 2006, which is dedicated to discussion of free speech.

Ross Anderson, Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge is urging Microsoft to code backdoors into the Windows Vista filesystem to make it possible to extract encrypted data.

David G. Rayburn, after the Superbowl was over, killed his wife and stepson as they slept with a hammer and then hung himself in the basement with a nylon rope. The strange thing about this murder/suicide is that he left a bizarre cryptogram for a suicide note (a high-res image of it can be found in Bruce Schneier's weblog). No one knows why he did what he did - he didn't have a motive, as far as anyone knows, for murder or for suicide, the only clue is the note he left. I've looked at the note, and it's not in any language I've seen before. It doesn't look like any sigils I've seen published anywhere, either. Very odd.

2006/02/15

Pre-registration for the sixth HOPE conference is now open.

The Ohio state school board voted yesterday to remove passages in the state's standardised science curriculem that teach students to decide for themselves on the matter of evolution vs. creationism by doing their own research and making up their own minds.

As always in public school, making up your own mind is verboten.

In the state of Massachusetts, the state pharmacy board has ordered Wal-Mart to stock the day-after pill, to be made available by prescription. 's about damn time.

Children in kindergarten are being trained to challenge science in any way possible in school in favour of creationism. They are being taught to challenge their textbooks in light of so-called Intelligent Design doctrine in school. Most are already enrolled in Christian homeschooling plans of some kind (which makes me wonder exactly which teachers they're going to be challenging if they're homeschooled..) so they can pick and choose their texts without too much difficulty in most of the country.

This is truly a sad day: Loompanics is going out of business but having a sale to blow out their stock. Ladies and gentlemen, start your scanners, PDF binders, and BitTorrent trackers.

I woke up this afternoon shortly after noon after pulling an all-nighter for work, feeling pretty well but bleary and with a headache that just wouldn't quit. I'm not sure if it was dinner last night or the disruption to my sleep schedule but I felt pretty fragile today.

Last night on my way home from work, I stopped off at the store to pick up a few things to make Valentine's Day dinner for Lyssa, and recieved a call from my boss on the cellphone last night while I was standing in the checkout line: The thirty minute countdown timer to get home and get to fixing stuff had started. I dashed home, gave Lyssa the bouquet of white roses I'd picked up at the store, and after a few minutes I jacked straight in.

Suffice it to say that enough time had passed that making dinner was out of the question because neither of us were thinking straight at the time (due to low blood sugar) and I was all but frothing at the mouth from what had transpired at work. Not only had the hammer fallen on a crisis at work but Leandra's power supply gave up the ghost. It's been dodgy for a while now, kicking out at odd times (usually during a hard reboot) and not wanting to do its job, but it finally failed. To be fair, it's sounded pretty bad for a while now, as loud as some power tools, I've been told.

Lyssa and I opted to go out for dinner last night for Valentine's Day, by way of Best Buy to pick up a new 500 watt Antec power supply for Leandra. For fun, we walked over to Chili's in the next parking lot for dinner. Both of us were famished after not eating all day so we dove right into an onion blossom (which turned out to be a mistake for both of us) and ordered dinner: Lyssa ordered a steak while I ordered a hamburger. Lyssa also opted for one of Chili's margeritas, which are very tasty and, as we found out first-hand, very, very powerful...

Dinner was wonderfully tasty.. I haven't had a good hamburger in a long time, though my digestive system has suddenly discovered that it hasn't had one in about as long and is trying like mad to hack together the necessary enzymes to digest it... this is very uncomfortable. Lyssa was rocked pretty hard so we decided to call it a night and head home, whereupon we set the alarm to get me up at 0145 EST and went to bed.

I woke up feeling like hell, with a nasty headache and dizzy, which all but abated by sunrise. I managed to bring Leandra back online somehow, but I knew that was a touchy proposition at best, and resolved to install that new power supply this afternoon after I woke up.

Got up shortly before 0800 EST this morning to drive Lyssa to the Metro station. Didn't feel much better then, either.

I finally got up around noon, cleaned up, and had a short lunch of cereal and raisins.. I'm off on my birthday - yay!

This afternoon after doing a bit of reading I made a few phone calls to try to track down some more components for Leandra, vis a vis Antec modular power cables because I figured that she'd be short some power couplings due to the sheer number of peripherals installed in her. Best Buy didn't have any but the clerk suggested that I check out Micro Center, which I plugged into Google.

There's a Micro Center not five miles from the apartment. I jumped into the TARDIS this wonderfully warm, 60 degree Farenheit afternoon and set out for the store.

Holy imploding Kibo, Micro Center is amazing. It's on par with some of the stores that Bladeless took me to in San Jose, California. It's like Wal-Mart for geeks, with everything from CPUs and motherboards to funky keyboards, laptop bags, and magazines. If you're a techie you can probably find it here.

I wound up buying some power coupling splitters on the off chance that I'd need them (I wound up not, much to my surprise, but people always tend to ask about them) and headed for home. En route, Dataline called to wish me a happy birthday; I did the same (because we share a birthday) and discovered that she'd just gotten out of the hospital...

She fell after work yesterday and sprained both ankles. She's using a walker to get around now.

Ack.

I finished reading a couple of books today, did some writing, and replaced the power supply in Leandra. Everything seems to be going swimmingly, for the most part.

I think Lyssa's got the flu - she's looking and feeling very fragile right now, and dropped not long after we got home this evening.

After a brief, light dinner she took me to the mall to buy my birthday gift - a 30 gig iPod.

That's right, I've become one of the iPod-people. The Kool-Aid is tasty. I'm using GTKpod to transfer a couple of hundred .mp3 files to my iPod for starters and I'll probably start pulling more off of backup CDs soon. I really need to learn how to use it effectively..

Thank you to Lyssa, Kash, the Lost Boys, Elwing, Alexius Pendragon, and one or two folks I've probably forgotten for chipping in to buy this for me. You and my iPod rock!

I should write about my birthday today, but not much has really happened to celebrate it. Lyssa baked me a cake last night and we went out for a while tonight, but we're really going to be celebrating this weekend, due to schedules and things like that. I'll write some thoughts on it when I get time tomorrow.

Andreas Katsulas, requisat en pace. Katsulas, best known for his role of Ambassador G'Kar on Babylon-5, died at the age of 59 on 13 February 2006 of lung cancer in Los Angeles, California.

Lyssa is, at this time, laying down trying to get some rest. I should join her soon.

2006/02/14

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.

There's customising your work environment, and then there's customising your work environment.

Think you can just go out and buy a new graphics card to take advantage of that shiny new HDCP monitor you just bought? You're in for a rough, rough time of it.

I find it funny that, scant days after Microsoft announced that it'd be selling its own AV software it released a signature update that identifies Norton Antivirus as malware, tries to remove it, and breaks it, which leaves the system further unprotected.

Conspiraacy? Naah.. remember, Hanlon's Razor is a useful tool.

It's come out that the Northwest Hospital and Medical Centre of Seattle, Washington was compromised by an intruder, identified as 20-year old Christopher Maxwell, who turned the hospital's internal computer network into a botnet. He and some unnamed coconspirators wrote a virus that infected computers after cutting deals with some above-board adware companies that pay per system running their malware. The zombieware he'd installed interfered with day to day operations of the hospital: Access cards stopped working; terminals in the ICU crashed; internal paging systems even stopped working, so doctors could not be contacted in emergencies.

This Hackers stuff is getting dangerous.

The water in the toilets of fast food restaurants in Florida has a lower bacterial count than the ice in the soda machines.

At this time, the link is Slashdotted, but 25 April 2006 has been announced as the official US release date for Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.

Researchers at the University of Southampton in the UK have figured out how to interface a slime mold to the control circuitry of a small robot. The slime mold acts in place of a CPU, causing it to move to avoid light, seek dark, and hide itself. Due to the natural activity of the slime mold, it also seeks out regions of high humidity.

Consumer VoIP company Skype has inked a deal with CPU giant Intel to rig up their client such that the Skype software will be crippled if it runs on anything but a true-blue Intel processor core. They've inserted some code that figures out the manufacturer of the system's CPU and limits such features as conference calling: Intel cores can have up to 10 people in a conference while boxen running AMD chips would be limited to 5 people in a conference. No word yet on other functionality that would be disabled. AMD, of course, is having kittens over this.

I wonder how hard it would be to fake the value returned...

Holy shit: First Dick Cheney accidentally shoots his birding buddy, then some birdshot migrates to the guy's heart and gives him a heart attack.

2006/02/13

Heads-up from the Sci-Fi Channel: They will start showing the new Doctor Who series at 2100 EST on 17 March 2006.

2006/02/12

It snowed in DC! Whee!

Yes, I actually am kind of happy about this.. I love snow, even thought I'm not exactly a fan of driving through a lot of it. The snow picked up after 2200 EST last night as Lyssa and I were flipping through channels looking for something that wouldn't cause our IQs to drop thirty points, and eventually settled on the Mythbusters marathon on the Discovery Channel last night. The first episode we tuned into happened to be the one talking about Archimedes' focused solar beam (readers of Slashdot no doubt heard about this a few weeks ago), which they managed to get to work with some help from some MIT students. We called Hasufin and Mika over to watch it; Hasufin is a history and archeology buff, which is why we called him at 2215 EST on a Saturday..

Lyssa wound up turning in around 0030 EST this morning; I joined her shortly afterward. Lyssa hasn't been feeling too well lately, her eye's been bothering her. We're not sure if it's the fact that her eye medication has changed slightly, if she's getting sick, or what. She's made an appointment for a glaucoma specialist to get her right eye checked out (on Valentine's Day, oddly enough), so we're waiting patiently to see what's what.

This morning, Lyssa and I were awakened by sirens coming from the office: The UPSes were going off because we'd lost power to our apartment building. I'm not sure but I think the heavy snowfall of last night had something to do with it. Thankfully, power was restored in a few minutes, before we had to worry about something like the heat going offline.

After breakfast this morning Lyssa and I decided to go play in the snow. We put on our warmest clothes and our boots and headed out into the courtyard by way of our building's laundry room. The snow, while light and fluffy, isn't the kind that's good for packing. If you work at it a while you can make decent snowballs but if you want to build anything larger, like a snow creature, you've got your work cut out for you. Still, this didn't stop Lyssa and I from trying. We wound up sculpting a six-foot high snow homunculus that we dubbed 'Lumpy', in deference to the many younglings who live in our complex. When it was all said and done he looked up close like a surgically sterile Hieronymus Bosch sculpture with vaguely humanoid features peeping out of the lumps of snow that Lyssa and I had packed around the central structure. After about an hour Lyssa figure out a method to roll decently sized balls of snow to add to Lumpy's structure, but the snow wouldn't let us make a traditional snowman.

At the end we used pieces of bark and sticks to make arms and facial features for Lumpy. I've got some pictures of Lumpy in my camera that I'll upload later.

Lyssa went back into the apartment to relax a bit and take some photographs of Lumpy from the balcony while I ventured back out to do some digging to unbury the TARDIS, which was covered with a good six inches of snow from last night. I fired up the engine while I worked to give my car a chance to warm up and thin the oil. It didn't take very long because the snow, while piled high, wasn't frozen, just damp enough to make big chunks, which were easy to sweep off. I also took a few minutes to stomp down the snow (about a foot in height) because the snowplow had stranded every car in the lot by packing the snow up behind them... after the initial packing I rocked the car back and forth for a while to crush the snow down as much as possible so that the TARDIS wasn't trapped anymore. I'm not sure if I'll be able to drive to work tomorrow, but you won't be able to say that I didn't try.

1316 EST: It's started to snow again.

Later in the afternoon, some of the kids knocked Lumpy over and were seen rolling him about trying to build up more snow. When last spotted, they'd gotten bored and were throwing snowballs in the parking lot. Thanks, guys.

Employees of CityWater.com, based out of Cincinatti, Ohio now must have RFID chips implanted via subcutaneous injection to gain access to the datacentre. This is because the company stores recordings from surveillance cameras scattered around the city.

In other news, those very same RFID chips can be easily duplicated.

...what the hell?! Devo action figures?!

The US government has concluded their infowargames, code-named "Cyber Storm" (heh.. paging Angela Bennet.. paging Angela Bennet..), and they've decided that bloggers constitute a threat to their information infrastructure. Yes, webloggers are a danger because we can contact people far and wide, rally folks to a cause, rant and rave about what's going on, and start misinformation campaigns.

Wow. I feel like I should start laughing or something. Are we going to have to register our websites with the DHS? Are copies of Movable Type going to be restricted in the same way that typewriters were in Russia back in the Cold War?

Not bloody likely.

Scientists working out of Utah have discovered a new chemical that seems to work far better than current treatments for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The compound, code-named CSA-54, works like the interferons normally produced by a healthy human immune system to combat viral infection. Their experimental results, limited to samples of HIV in test tubes, have been reproduced many times, but they're not yet ready to begin full-scale testing. CSA-54 works by interfering with the interaction of HIV with T-cells in the immune system, which prevents their infection and subsequent usurpation. Tests were positive with all known strains of HIV in labs (which is quite a few - a few hundred thousand, I heard once).

Now to see who buys it and takes out a boatload of patents on it...

2006/02/11

It's 0040 EST, and once again I'm pulling an all-nighter. Gotta love deadlines when they're predicting a snowstorm for the area...

Work has been rough this week - the days are going fast but that's because a lot of stuff is going on and there isn't much time to breathe. Even going home has been in a rush, which lead to my cutting a corner not sharply enough in the parking garage and scraping the front left fender (again!) against a concrete post, which took a hefty patch of paint off of the fender.

I've been saying many nasty things about that ever since then. I give up. Time to find a body shop that won't demand a pound of flesh and a couple of gigs of storage out of my brain to get the TARDIS fixed up.

I also need to fix Leandra's exhaust fan. It sounds like a buzzsaw most of the time.

Friday night, Lyssa was supposed to go to a knitting class at a local art store. After work I hurried home to pick her up, and then went out to dinner at the local Chinese takeout joint for a pair of combo plates, which we wolfed down as fast as we could so I could head to Michael's to drop her off. I wasn't intending to take that class because I wanted to work on some articles that I've been meaning to submit to various magazines, so I turned around and drove home. No sooner had I taken my boots off than my cellphone rang: It was Lyssa, tellingme that she couldn't take the class because she hadn't registered 48 hours ahead of time.

Back to the TARDIS. Back to Michael's. Pick Lyssa up and off to Trader Joe's to get groceries, not because of the snowstorm they're predicting but because we're out of just about everything.

I think we got back around 2030 or so Friday night, after I recieved a phone call on the way home from my boss - something odd was afoot at work and I had to jack back in to check it out.

I sat down to hack on that for a while, got it taken care of, and then spent some time trying to relax. It didn't work too well, unfortunately. I've got a tendency to be a type 'A' personality, which is rapidly becoming my nature.

Lyssa has gone to bed; she fears that she's coming down with a cold (maybe the one my body just shook) and doesn't want to get sick. I jumped out a little before midnight tonight to pick up some cold medication for her to leave in the bathroom while I'm doing work-type stuff.

I need to learn how to relax again. I'm grinding my teeth again, and that's not good with a temporary dental crown.

The left hinge of my jaw is still sore. I think I've figured out why: The dentist shot me up four or five times with lidocaine to numb my jaw enough to do what she had to do. That's a lot of fluid, and it's not going to drain off all at once. This afternoon I took a peek at the inside of my mouth and noticed that the gum tissue is still swollen, distended, and very loose.. I'm pretty sure that is the result of all that fluid still inside the gum tissue, slowly being absorbed by the body. That's going to take a while.

Tomorrow morning: Off to the post office to ship some stuff out.

There was other stuff that I wanted to write about.. have to find it in my head.

My birthday's coming up next week. 15 February. I'll be.. let's just say that the digits '2' and '8' are in there next to one another somewhere in that order. Unfortunately, it falls in the middle of the week this year, but I'd like to get together with friends on Saturday (18 February 2006) to spend the day and celebrate. E-mail me if you're free on Saturday to get together.

My birthdate is the first in the broad web of coincidences that comprises my life this time 'round. I was born on the same day as my biological mother, some years and a few hours apart in the same city.

Okay. Off to bed. It's 0230 EST.

Remember Hurricane Katrina?

I know, it's so six months ago... but there are still people in Louisiana trying to get back on their feet however they can. Of course, many are petioning the US government for help in various forms, but it's slow going. There are reams of documents pertaining to what's going on but they'll probably never be released to the public because they carefully documented every screwup and change of plans that have hamstrung things to this day. The Washington Post was able to get its hands on 41 pages of memos from the DHS, which contained, among other things, warnings that Katrina would be far worse than any simulation they'd ever run becuase the levees would probably be broken by the storm and that it would require effort beyond what they have ever had to put forth to clean up.

When it came to actual work, the federal government placed the responsibility squarely on what was left of the local governments of the area. When it came to the leaking levees, the Army Corps of Engineers didn't pay any attention to the reports of water building up on the wrong side of the structurse.

While I'm in a low blood sugar induced bad mood, check this out: Plans for the large scale eavesdropping of private US citizens were put together back in the 1980's but enacted only within the past six years. Way back when, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were discussing exactly what would be necessary to put together such a surveillance programme in the US and put together what they thought was a workable plan. This plan is part of what they call CoG - Continuity of Government - which basically means that if the leaders of the US are in a bad way they could evacuate to hidden facilities and pickup where they left off. The article mentions 'Site R' on the Maryland/Pennsylvania border; this is probably Mount Weather, which was prepared for this purpose during the height of the Cold War.

More on the topic of wiretapping: Not too long ago George W. Bush was speaking in Cambridge, Maryland about the NSA's monitoring programme, and when security was clearing the press out of the room for the 'secret session' they left the microphone on: Bush said over the open mic "I support the free press, but let's just get them out of the room."

Not too free a press if you have to sweep them out because you don't want them to know what's going on, is it?

The state of South Dakota voted to ban abortion 47 to 22. Even under situations of rape, incest, or ill health of the mother, abortion is still illegal.

What is this, the 1970's?

2044 EST: Still feeling groggy as hell, and not quite all here. I've been feeling this way since this afternoon, actually, when I took a nap. I'm not sure what the hell happened to Lyssa and myself, but we've been running in slow motion all day. Even the trip to the store to mail some stuff out and pick up groceries for the week (so that we don't have to go anywhere tomorrow, don't you know) was running at three-quarters speed. I'm finding it difficult to concentrate or even type right now (because I lost the feeling in my hands due to the cold) and the muscles in Lyssa's neck are in spasm.

On and off all day today, it's been trying to snow outside. Pretty much all day it's been kind of cold and raining; I've heard that by late afternoon it had turned to sleet. I peeked outside a few minutes ago and discovered a coating of snow over everything. The state of Virginia has put out a winter weather advisory, complete with tickets for parking on the side of the road. Looking out of my window shows that it is indeed still snowing, with no signs of letting up.

Apologies and get-well wishes to Derek Pegritz, who passed a kidney stone today. Shit, dude.. you never do it the easy way, do you?

Your Five Variable Love Profile

Propensity for Monogamy: Your propensity for monogamy is medium. In general, you prefer to have only one love interest. But it's hard for you to stay devoted for too long! There's too much eye candy to keep you from wandering. Experience Level: Your experience level is high. You've loved, lost, and loved again. You have had a wide range of love experiences. And when the real thing comes along, you know it! Dominance: Your dominance is medium. You tend to be the one with more power. You aren't a total control freak in relationships.. But of course you don't mind getting you way! Cynicism: Your cynicism is medium. You'd like to believe in true and everlasting love... But you've definitely been burned enough to know better. You're still an optimist, but you also are a realist. Independence: Your independence is high. You don't need to be in love, and sometimes you don't even want love. Having your own life is very important for you... Even more important than having a relationship.

The Five Variable Love Test

Earlier this evening I was sprawled out on the floor in the living room playing Final Fantasy VII and I noticed crawling across the floor a tiny house spider, about the size of an American nickel. He sat down in front of me for quite a while, maybe fifteen minutes, just hanging out.. then he took off as fast as his legs could carry him across the room for parts unknown.

I think he was just checking up on me.

2006/02/10

Back in December of 2005 it came out that the PATRIOT Act was up for a permanancy vote. There was some concern about the proposed changes to the controversial act at the time. This week, lawmakers cut a deal with the White House because the PATRIOT Act renewal had been blocked because it didn't go far enough to protect civil liberties. A vote in the House of Representatives allowed for the nenewal of the PATRIOT Act but the motion was blocked in the Senate. While it is still possible for the government to seize the business records of whatever entity it so chooses for analysis for signs of terrorism, it is now possible to contest this in court.

At 1324 EST today, some of you on the eastern seaboard probably heard a sound not dissimiliar to a concert B-flat sounding from 40,000 feet above sea level. This is probably not one of the signs of the apocalypse, it was the Virginia DMV telling me that they had recieved the title to my car and updated my records to reflec that my car is now fully and completely registered in the state of Virginia. They'd recieved the paperwork some time in September of 2005 and marked everything copacetic around 30 September 2005.

They just didn't tell me that they don't send out updated registration documents after this is done, they just assume that you trust them to do the right thing.

As with all things, I suggest the application of Gorbachev's Razor in matters such as these: "Trust, but verify."

If you've ever used Google Desktop, you're familiar with its functionality. Among the nifty stuff it does, it will index everything on your computer so you can find what you need in a hurry. This means that the indexing data is uploaded to Google; the searches are done using the same search clusters that you access by going to www.google.com. It should be noted that Google's been approached by the US government to turn over search engine records...

Those search engine records include the Google searches you're running on the computers you've installed Google Desktop on to find the latest revision of your resume'.

Think about that for a while.

The EFF has a couple of things to say about this, also.

While we're on the subject of monitoring, the executive branch of the US government is battening down the hatches due to the hearings now being held by the Senate Judiciary Committee. In fact, Karl Rove himself is going around to Congressfolk and threatening to blacklist anyone who votes against the monitoring of private citizens without a warrant. The hearings began on 6 February, and will determine whether or not the FISA Act of 1978 was violated or not. It isn't known at this time if the contents of Rove's luggage include a rubber hose, telephone directory, stick of salami, or enema bag full of bleach.

It should also be noted that so many wiretaps are being ordered by the US government that big telecom companies, like Verizon, are having a hard time keeping up with them all. A number of private companies have been formed in the past four years to help telecom companies implement and manage all of these wiretaps. Since 2000, the number of taps has increased by 44%, which is one hell fo a jump. While smaller telecom companies haven't said if they'd been approached by the NSA or not, they also might not be in a position to talk about it.

I. Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney's former Chief of Staff testified that he ws ordered to leak information to the press that Iraq was trying to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, information which later turned out to be false. No one's quite sure yet if Cheney himself or someone else gave him the order though.

2006/02/09

One of NASA's press folks, appointed by George W. Bush himself has resigned amidst controversy (login required - Bugmenot.com can hook you up). One George Deutsch, who was tasked with limiting what the press could publish about NASA's research into environmental change, global warming, and cosmology, forced at least one web designer to place the word 'theory' after every mention of the Big Bang on NASA websites (apparently, he doesn't know what the word means). This wasn't why he resigned, though - he quit because Texas A&M confirmed that he never graduated from there, to the contrary of his CV and resume' on file at NASA. This whole bruhaha started when a number of respected scientists at NASA approached the New York Times about censorship of their work coming down from the White House by way of Deutsch. After some digging it came out that Deutsch had faked parts of his resume' to get his job.

First Lieutenant Eddie Rebrook IV of Charleston, West Virginia, was injured in the line of duty in Iraq in 2005 and was discharged due to the extent of his injuries. He was charged $700us to replace the bulletproof vest that apparently didn't do anything to protect him by the US Army.

The US government is planning another public monitoring system, tentatively called ADVISE, which stands for Analysis, Dissemination, Visualisation, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (who came up with this?). It's supposed to monitor e-mail, websites, weblogs, and what have you on the Net for signs of terrorist activity. Supposedly it's already come in handy for stopping a couple of plots.

I can't help but envision teams of interns reading LiveJournal and running Google searches in darkened chambers.

This is kind of iffy insofar as the Net is concerned. If you post to the Net potentially anyone can read it, be it on a Usenet newsgroup, an e-mail list, or a weblog (your own or someone else's) it's out there for every search engine on the Net to index and most everyone on the Net to gain access to, in one way or another. If you don't want it indexed, don't put it somewhere where a search engine will see it. Don't post about it. Tell someone privately.

2006/02/08

Woke up this morning without a whole lot of pain in my jaw, save the muscle trouble at the back. I'm still getting used to the temporary crown, which lacks many of the structural features of a real tooth so it doesn't feel right when the teeth at the back meet. From past experience, it doesn't take long to get used to, but it is a little distracting when trying to eat. I'll only have to have it for about two weeks, until the permanant crown is installed.

This makes me worry just a little bit: America On-Line and Yahoo are considering plans to sell direct e-mail access to their customer bases, bypassing all spam filters, no questions asked. The idea is that a company pays some amount of money per message per e-mail address (say, $0.025us) and whatever they want to send can go straight through to the inbox. This is being called another aspect of what net.pundits are calling the "two-tiered Internet", where there are certain services or networks that just work better depending on how much someone pays.

Most modern cellphones these days have GPS recievers in them, which are used when making 911 calls. The idea is that if you call your cellphone transmits your current physical location to the 911 office so they know where to send the emergency units. However, quite a few cell companies around the world are selling access to those GPS records in near realtime to whomever can pay for them. Companies are using these services to keep tabs on their employees while they're offsite, so they know what you're probably up to, or can at least make an educated guess.

Not too long ago a federal grand jury indicted private detective Anthony Pellicano on 110 counts of racketeering, illegal wiretapping, fraud, identity theft, and a few other things. In the late 1990's Pellicano was bribing police officers for access to information held by law enforcement on certain people, ranging from journalist Anita Busch to Sylvester Stallone. He also paid a software engineer and a telecom engineer (who weren't named) to write for him an application that he called Telesluth, which was used to wiretap people. What exactly this app does and how it worked isn't mentioned, though - there are lots of ways to bug someone's phone; software like this could reprogram a cellphone (1995.. the time's right for such an app) or generate command strings for telecom switches to implement so-called silent three-way taps (but you'd still need access to the switches, and that's no mean feat). There isn't enough information to say in here.

2006/02/07

Dental work in about an hour; I'm working from home today. At the very least a crown is going to be installed on that broken molar. I'm praying that a root canal won't be involved.

1351 EST: Back from the dentist, sore, not liking life a whole lot right now. The old filling had to be drilled out, which is always entertaining. The process of numbing the site was even less fun, because it took somewhere between three and five injections of lidocaine before everything powered down. As a result, while most of my jaw feels like plastic the hinge is firing off error messages left and right. At one point a bite block was used to prop my mouth open because the muscles were so sore they wouldn't work. Under all of the amalgam filling was yet more decay that had to be drilled out. Thankfully the pulp wasn't exposed, so the dentist didn't have to open anything up for the main show. What's left of my molar (an unspecified percentage of mass above the gum) has been packed in plastic and built up; a temporary crown was installed. To get the temporary crown fitted, though, took three casting attempts, each more painful than the last because not only is my jaw sore, but so are my gums and the roof of my mouth.

Highlights of the day: "Huh. Your teeth have harder enamel than most people. My drill's not working right." "I've never seen a tooth structure like this before." "Your wisdom teeth are in the way again."

Gallifreyan physiology strikes again. At least she didn't discover the extraroot canal on that tooth.

At this time I've got an Advil tablet in my along with some orange/pineapple juice, and I'm patiently waiting for everything to return to normal.

The Army Corps of Engineers has contracted with the company Kellogg, Brown, and Root (a subsidiary of Halliburton) to construct detention centres around the country, in the event that a large influx of people should cross the border into the country and to support programmes that might require more detention space, whatever that means. One Jamie Zuieback, spokesperson for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, went on the record as saying that the centres would only be built in the event of an emergency (no word on how they'd get them done in time to cover said emergency) and that they might never be constructed. What kind of mass immigration could they be talking about? Are they expecting most of France or Cuba to suddenly flee to the United States?

It's a little known fact that when the US offers support to a country, they put certain stipulations on the support. Every once in a while, though, someone gets uppity and decides to work around them. The British government is offering aid specifically to family planning organisations in developing countries because the US specifically earmarks all of its money so that it can't be used for this purpose. It's come out that another of the restrictions the US puts on aid funs is that organisations applying for US funds are specifically forbidden to counsel women on abortion services, otherwise they'll get their funding cut. This is being referred to as the 'global gag order'.

The White House Press Secretary got raked over the coals today over the clandestine monitoring the NSA's been doing and got into it with the reporter.

A couple of days ago I finished downloading the ISO image of the DVD release of Fullmetal Alchemist: The Conquerer of Shamballah after a subtitling team had gotten hold of it and worked their magic. They packaged a new ISO image, ready to burn to a double-layer DVD (it's huge, about seven gigabytes in size) to play back. Lyssa had transferred it on Alphonse originally, and because Al has a double-layer DVD writer he was the logical choice to do the job.

Well, it burned properly. It didn't play back in the DVD player in the living room (I suspect it has something to do with the fact that it was burned to a double layer DVD+R disk). It didn't play back in Leandra (her DVD-ROM drive is actually kind of old, and might not support double-layer DVDs; her DVD writer was able to mount it and read datafiles normally but not play it back). I have a suspicion that it has to do with the internal structure of the ISO image itself: Ordinarily the two directories on a video DVD are AUDIO_TS/ and VIDEO_TS/, and this disk image had the directory and file names in lowercase. I'm not sure yet if that makes a difference or not. Once again, Alphonse was the logical choice.

I'll try not to put too many spoilers in my review; of those that I must give to speak my mind, I'll try to obscure them as much as possible by omitting the necessary context. If you still don't want to know, stop reading and pick up again tomorrow morning.

I expected the movie to be unfinished, a rehash of the series, and generally not nearly as good original. I was wrong. The only rehashing was done in the opening credits to refresh the viewers' memory. It picks up smoothly about two years after the series and keeps going with the original themes. Edward Elric is still on the other side; Alphonse is back on his feet and studying alchemy. The fact that he dresses in the same manner that his brother did wasn't a bad sign at all but I wonder why he copied it so closely; it smacked of hero worship to me. Some favourite characters are still around and doing their thing, including Winry Rockbell and Alex Louis Armstrong. We find out what Ed's been up to on the other side and the funny business he's gotten tangled up in. Some familiar faces are on the other side, also, but not in the same circumstances we remember them in, which is refreshing. While it's new, it's not haphazard or out of character.

The storyline is coherent, well thought out, and very well executed. The animation is top-notch, though there are a few things that are very obviously computer generated and don't match up with the more prevalent cel painted graphics elsewhere. In one or two places it works well but by and large it jumps out. The events brewing on the other side are not too overboard or too slow paced.

If you've a head for symbols, you'll definitely notice a few things that'll make you raise an eyebrow.

Did Alphonse figure out some new tricks insofar as human transmutation is concerned? When did Hoenheim become a prosthetician?

The bad guys are badasses, no two ways about it, though a bit more character development would have been nice. If you know anything about early 20th century European history (especially some of the strange stuff) you'll be able to fill in the blanks without too much trouble. The reasons given for what happened make perfect sense. In real life, they also make perfect sense. The human race could definitely learn a thing or two from those two or three minutes of the movie.

Unfortunately, the movie doesn't really end on a high note, and that's sort of not sitting well with me right now.

Final rating: Ten out of ten stars. While there are some things that I'm not wild about in the movie, it's definitely one of the best I've seen all year.

Download it if you can and watch it. When it's officially released, buy it and watch it. I kind of hope that it gets a theatrical release somewhere in the US, but I'm not holding my breath. I'm actually expecting Cartoon Network to pick it up.

2006/02/06

While I really wasn't paying much attention to the Superbowl last night, I have to say I was very impressed with the MacGyver Mastercharge check card commercial. It's rare that a commercial can get me to start laughing.

Mark Twain famously wrote, "Reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated," and the same thing goes for SuitSat, launched from the International Space Station this weekend. Reports have been trickling in from radio hams that they are indeed picking up a weak signal from SuitSat on 145.990MHz.

It's baaaaaack.. and it's creepy as hell. Worth1000.com is running another Photoshop someone into a manga character contest, and the results are damn scary.

2006/02/05

You are a Mouse! (Remember, this actually includes ALL rodent
types.)

What kind of furry are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Meep?

So... last night was game night at the apartment, and once again I'm very pleased with how things turned out. We were short a player or two last night but I had a couple of things written to keep everyone busy, and they walked right into everything. I'm once again surprised by what they were doing to the storyline, but if it's one thing that good players do, it's keep you on your toes but give you enough to play off of. It's going to be another two-part story, I've a feeling, and I need to flesh stuff out to give them a bit more to explore.

I'll figure it out.

Last night Kash and Duo came over to spend the night again, and after getting set up around the apartment we headed out in search of lunch after a later start to the day than usual which involved my cellphone ringing at 0600 that morning.. twice.

I won't get into that. Suffice it to say that it's going to be a long week, and I don't mean just from the dental work on Tuesday.

Anyway, we drove around for a while looking for someplace to get lunch, and eventually settled on a tiny little restaurant/grocery called the Al Nakheel Kebab and Cafe (340 Maple Avenue West; Vienna, VA, 22180). The Al Makheel is, to put it simply, one of those amazing little restaurants that you stumble across when you least expect it that has food that causes you to go back time and again... I think we've got a brand new favourite restaurant down here.

Last night before the game started the four of us (Lyssa, Mika, Hasufin, and myself) jumped out to Trader Joe's for stuff for dinner before the game really started. I filled everyone in on some of the background stuff that's been happening as we hunted down stuff in the store, then returned home to start the game off.

Around 2230 EST last night Duo discovered that the toilet was broken. Specifically, it began to overflow after a test flush because "It was looking funky" and resulted in a bit of a panic. Hasufin managed to get the water turned off at the valve as I called the emergency maintenance line and started mopping up the spilled water. The maintenance guy came with spare parts and got everything working in amazingly short order, which impressed me to no end. For everything that honks me off about living here, there are some advantages to it, and the maintenance staff is one of those things.

It's amazing what stress can do to you. I've been sleeping, when the opportnity presents itself, twelve hours at a stretch to recuperate lately. I don't have much time to really write the way I used to, and in the evenings I'm either still working or dead tired. Either way, my sense of time is getting messed up, and it's hard to keep everything in order in my head. I need to go back and edit more and more these days, when I have the time.

I didn't really do what I wanted to do this weekend... I was hoping to lay around for a while and read some of the huge stack of books that's been piling up, but that didn't happen. I did, however, get a lot of the apartment cleaned up, which I can't complain too much about. Didn't get to work on any of the articles I've been writing for a couple of magazines lately, either. I'd like to get everything done before I start forgetting it all. One of my side projects that I've been wanting to pick lately, on the advisement of that Tarot reading a while ago, has also been badly sidetracked, which really gets under my skin.

This bothers me.

Time to figure out a solution.

It's 1849 EST. I just got off a two-hour emergency call at work.

Time for some Goldschlager.

...what the hell is it about candied chickpeas?

2212 EST: Wait a second.. The Steelers WON?!?

2006/02/04

NASA announced that Suitsat had been launched from the International Space Station a little more than sixteen hours ago, but it's not looking good. They've announced that Suitsat went dead after two orbits around the Earth. Very sad... I had hopes of picking it up once or twice from my scanner. A lot of kids who might otherwise have gotten interested in ham radio are also missing out.

This is awesome: C'thul'hu in Lego!

If you look closely, you'll even find a hidden TARDIS in that diorama.

It's not just US citizens whose communications are being monitored these days - back in 2004 during the Olympics mobile phones belonging to the Greek military and government were under active surveillance. Over 100 separate phones were tapped, among them those belonging to the Greek Prime Minister (!), the Greek Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the Greek Minister of Justice, to say nothing of the bigwigs in the country's military. The taps were active until March of 2005, when word about them got out. The exact method of monitoring was a technique very much like one used by phone phreaks in the early 1990': Someone installed new software into the telephony switches handling calls from those cellphones that silently set up what amount to conference calls that included a number of prepaid cellphones that were owned by.. there's really no way of knowing who was using those cellphones, come to think of it. It is thought that nothing of great importance was tapped (discussing classified matters over unsecured lines is a security leak no matter what country you work for) but you never can be sure about that... the unauthorised call monitoring software was isolated and removed.

If they know who was doing the wiretapping, they're not saying.

2006/02/03

This is the sort of thing that makes me want to perform a little corrective phrenology on people, in the hope of inculcating a little more common sense in the human race. One John Patterson of Louisiana is suing Apple Computer because iPods can cause hearing loss. First of all, just about every piece of audio equipment on the market these days comes with warnings that say that you're going to ruin your hearing if you listen to music too loudly, especially if you're using headphones. His argument that the iPod has insufficient warnings is, in a word, jetwash. Second, Patterson is warning that iPods can cause hearing loss because they can crank out sound in excess of 115 dB, which is enough to turn the little hair cells in the inner ear of humans into smoking stubs. Thirdly.. Patterson doesn't even have hearing loss, or if he does it's not from an iPod.

Folks.. stop suing people because you're acting like a dumbass and take a little responsibility for your lives and your actions. It's a well known fact that high sound pressures can destroy hearing. This has been known for several decades now and it's been published all over the place. If you value your hearing it isn't the responsibility of the manufacturers to protect you, it's your responsibility. If you want to keep your hearing, don't listen to your iPods loudly enough that everyone around you can hear what you're listening to. If you're riding on the bus or in an elevator and other people can name the songs that you're listening to, you've got your volume cranked up too loudly. Turn the damn volume down. Apple shouldn't have to pay for your stupidity.

Senator Arlen Specter's at it again (we just can't get this guy out of the US Senate, no matter how we vote), this time with a bill called HR 683, also called the Trademark Dilution Revision Act. Thiss law, if passed, will make it illegal to depict trademarks under fair use in non-commercial speech, including art, writing (weblogs, anyone?), and music. For example, if you write a Livejournal entry about going to McDonald's and someone sees it, you could be sued for using their name without permission. If that sounds a bit daft to you, check out the example given in the article where one David Farber, who drew a Volkswagon Bug made entirely out of butterflies and other insects, took the picture down because Volkswagon threatened to sue him.

An organisation called the CRN (Communications Research Network) is wondering if VoIP (voice over IP) could be used by black hats to confer, especially when it comes to setting up now-profitable botnets. They say that botnet zombies might be controllable via VoIP technology, specifically. They are also calling for VoIP providers to publish the specs of their routers, switches, and what have you so that countermeasures could be devised against this sort of thing.

This doesn't sound right. I don't know if it's the general tone of this article or if these CRN folks don't know what they're talking about, but it's missing some facts.

First of all, VoIP is actually a combination of technologies. First, you need a signalling protocol to control the parameters of the connection - most every provider out there uses a protocol called SIP, the Session Initiation Protocol. While it could be possible to use SIP to tunnel bot commands to compromised hosts, there are better ways of going about it because SIP runs most often over UDP, which poses certain problems for hosts (compromised and otherwise) behind firewalls. Every provider has a different solution to this, with varying degrees of success. Second, actual VoIP traffic is encoded by one of group of CODECs, which basically take audio of some kind and turn it into binary for transmission across the Net to be decoded and turned back into sound by the client on the other side. This data is encapsulated by another protocol, usually RTP.

Now, this seems to make sense at first shine: Take a protocol and hide your bot commands (like "START SYN FLOOD" or "START SENDING SPAM") inside it. The thing is, it was designed for streaming content, like audio or video. It would be the wrong tool for the job; something like TCP would be a better choice (and is used for transporting commands anyway). There's another thing with using a stream of digitised audio to send bot commands: Unless the bot has some pretty hefty voice recognition code built into it or the bot's designed to compromise systems that already have voice recognition software built into it, it's the wrong tool for the job. There's another problem with that: VoIP CODECs were designed with voices in mind, not data streams, which the article suggests. It can take some work to get a mere fax transmission working over a VoIP connection; I don't know of anyone who's ever tried something like what they suggest.

The article mentions the fact that VoIP often bounces through multiple nets before reaching its destination. While SIP traffic can and sometimes does hop through multiple providers' networks, RTP traffic goes from endpoint to endpoint directly. As for ISPs blocking VoIP traffic.. some do. The ones, I have noticed, that are either offering VoIP to their own customers or plan to do so in the next year or so, in my experience.

Now, maybe the article did make a dog's breakfast out of the real report. I don't know. What I do know is that the article got a lot of stuff wrong.

Square Pictures is considering releasing Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children in the United States. I wonder if the ISO images of the fansubs on just about every BitTorrent tracker on the Net gave them this idea.

Come on, Square.. you know it's going to go over big. Release it legally.

The Pittsburgh Steelers made it to the Superbowl.. and you'd think they're preparing for World War III in the Steel City.

2006/02/02

All of the negative publicity surrounding the arrest of Cindy Sheehan must be drawing attention inside the Beltway - charges of unlawful conduct were dropped against her and an apology was issued. DC Police Chief Terrance Gainer was quoted as saying that "The officers made a good faith, but mistaken effort to enforce an old unwritten interpretation of the prohibitions about demonstrating in the Capitol."

I don't know if he's not aware of the new law passed or if he's talking through his hat but he accepted responsibility for the fiasco.

It also came out that Beverly Young, wife of Florida Representative Bill Young was arrested for wearing a shirt that read "Support our troops" - seeing as how she's the wife of a Republican House rep, I'd have thought her show of solidarity would have gone over well. Oops.

Well, it happened - the budget reformation bill passed, which cuts funding not only to student loans but Medicaid and Medicare. The bill passed by just two votes (216-214). Now it has to be signed into law, which I'm pretty sure is going to happen.

In an amazing screwup, copies of the newspapers the Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram and Gazette were distributed to subscribers wrapped in printouts of people's credit card information a few days ago. The data was on the reverse side of paper (probably re-used greenbar printout) used to wrap up bundles of newspaper for delivery. As if that weren't enough, the checking account and routing numbers of subscribers wound up on some of the paper, which is arguably just as bad.

After you die... Heaven After death, you will exist in heaven. Everything and everyone you love will constantly surround you for all of eternity. You lucky scoundrel.

Take this quiz at QuizGalaxy.com

Huh. That's not what I expected.

EAGLE or HAWK - your daemon may be some kind of
bird of prey. Yours is a strong spirit, and a
fierce sense of liberty. You cannot be
confined. You may be shrewdly observant, and
like to be aware of everything that goes on
around you. You will fight fiercely for the
things that are most important to you, and
you are definitely a force to be reckoned
with. Still, you are not vicious by nature
and would prefer to be left in peace. You
probably value your solitude very highly -
not that you don't enjoy company, but
sometimes you just need to be alone -
otherwise you begin to feel caged in and
confined. You might want to take a drive on
your own, just to feel the road beneath you,
or to sit alone on your balcony, watching the
world go by.

What Is Your Daemon?
brought to you by Quizilla

Huh.

Yay, anatomically correct snow sculptures.

I think I've just found one of my biggest influences in my formative years, a music video that I've only seen once before.

Back in 1987 a certain dance track by MARRS called Pump Up The Volume snuck to the top of the charts for a while. MARRS, comprised of members of the bands Colourbox and AR Kane, never released anything after that, I think due to the exceptional reclusiveness of the members of Colourbox, who wanted to be musicians and not performers.

That song (that, and the new wave version of Also Sprach Zarathustra, from the soundtrack to 2010, which wasn't actually in the movie) awakened in me an obsession with electronic music that's persisted to this day. One day I just happened to be watching MTV (I was quite small at the time, about nine years of age, I should think) and I caught the music video for Pump Up the Volume. I'd only seen it once, though I haunted MTV off and on for years afterward in the hopes of seeing it again.

For the halibut, I did another Google search for "M|A|R|R|S" (because that's how the band's name was spelled on the 45 rpm record, of course) after all these years and stumbled across the homepage for Colourbox, which listed a "best of" album.

Off to Amazon.

What sold me on this particular CD is that it features "enhanced CD video", which means that after the music tracks on the disk there's a standard ISO9660 CD-ROM data track.

The CD arrived in the mail today. Just a few minutes ago I mounted the disk in Leandra, copied the video (in Quicktime 4 format) from the disk, and watched it with mplayer. For the first time in almost twenty years, I've figured out why my love of video montage and trying to synchronise motion and video with sound effects (like record scratching and electronic samples) came from.

There was a version of the song which doesn't match any of the ones I've collected over the years. There was stock animation footage from NASA showing the Voyager space probes, moon landers, astronauts training for suborbital flights, and hypothetical probes landing on Mars and Venus. There was Atari text scrolling in the background and a shadowy overlay image of one of the members of Colourbox.

Let there be Pump Up the Volume.

I think I'll give writing music another shot.

2006/02/01

Still stick. Working from home today before the dentist's appointment at 1500 to get that broken molar looked at. I didn't expect to get an appointment so soon but given the way it's been bothering me lately, I'm hardly in a position to argue. Between the Centrum, Dayquil, and pulling a couple of tricks to jumpstart my body's immune system I woke up feeling a hell of a lot better than I did yesterday, but I'd like to make sure I've thrown this off before I go and infect everyone at work. Unfortunately I didn't sleep very well last night, I kept waking up every hour or so to toss, turn, cough, or the like. At least the body aches seem to have subsided - I need to drink a lot more water to get the toxins flushed out of my body.

Looked over the tarot spread that Lyssa did last night. It's given me some stuff to think about insofar as how life's been going lately. I might have to switch a few things around so that I don't keep running myself into the ground, like I have been the past couple of months. At least the holidays are over. It suggests that I look more into self expression and spend less time trying to be a perfectionist and manifesting a Platonic ideal (hit and sunk).

Anyone who reads my memory logs knows that one of my interests is freedom of expression, not only under the first amendment of the United States Constitution but freedom from so-called "chilling effects" lawsuits, which are basically attempts to shut people up that someone doesn't like. When this article about the supposed copyright to the BDSM insignia came across my desktop I sat up and took notice. In a nutshell.. Quagmyr has been fleecing people over it for years.

Fyodor has announced the release of Nmap v4.0, and the changelog is impressive, to say the least. Among the new features the portscanner to end all portscanners boasts, it is now capable of transmitting pure Ethernet frames, in addition to various kinds of network packets, ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) scanning, MAC address spoofing of scans, an overhauled UDP scanning engine, and a new scanning engine that is much faster than that of previous releases.

The AP deconstructed the State of the Union Address from last night, and it's interesting to see everything that's been drastically oversimplified, sometimes to the point of misinformation. Take, for example, oil imports - the US doesn't get the majority of its petrol from the Middle East but from Mexico, Venezuela, and Canada. Health care has not, in fact, gotten better, in fact it's gotten much more expensive because it's so damned hard to a) get insurance and b) afford it when you've got it. Hurricane Katrina relief isn't top-notch, either; funding was cut and the levees that they want to build will not be designed for a category-5 hurricane. As for the No Child Left Behind programme, was he even aware that reading test scores dropped?

Another addition to the USA PATRIOT Act has been publicized, one which makes it legal to haul protestors away to face felony charges of they breach a security perimeter. It should be noted that the notion of a "security perimeter" isn't defined by this new clause, and it can be construed to mean the entire facility housing an event, whether or not the protest turns rowdy. Cindy Sheehan discovered this last night as she was arrested at the State of the Union Address because she wore a t-shirt that listed the number of US troops killed in Iraq. It should be noted that she was there at the invitation of Congressfolk Lynn Wooolsey, John Conyers, Ann Wright, Malik Rahim, and John Cavanagh. A police officer saw her shirt, charged her, and hauled her bodily out of the People's House, where George W. Bush was giving the State of the Union Address last night.

Just a number on a shirt - that's not a protest, that's a reiteration of the nightly news, assuming that you believe their numbers. The nightly news reaches everywhere, even inside so-called "security perimeters". Does that make the nightly news a protest, too?

The trip to the dentist's office this afternoon went better than I thought it would - unlike last time, the dentist didn't perform an immediate root canal, even though the molar is missing about a quarter of its mass. I might not need a root canal at all, though I definitely need a crown for the tooth. I went to the Tysons Dental Associates office (8296A Old Courthouse Road; Vienna, VA, 22182; phone number 703-848-8906) in northern Virginia this afternoon to get said molar checked out. The first thing they did was take a full series of dental x-rays because I've never been there before. While not terribly amusing it went without a hitch. The examination by the dentist, however, shows that all the late nights without flossing have done a number on my teeth, as evidenced by the considerable effort she went to while clearing the tartar off of my teeth.

The dental hygenist, on the other hand, not only doesn't speak English very well but has all of the manual dexterity of an elephant not using its trunk while under the influence of PCP. I've never had such a rough workover before at the dentist's office. The dentist was also wondering why I don't have any metallic fillings in my mouth, which gives her some concern.

I think my gums have finally stopped bleeding.

Examining the x-rays showed a number of ominous shadows beneath a couple of fillings, which makes me wonder if Dr. Schrenker in Pittsburgh didn't clean them out as well as he thought he did. I don't relish the possibility of having a number of fillings drilled out and replaced.

It spooked me a little when the dentist asked me why I wear my hair so long - it would be a disadvantage in a fight, she said.

I'm a lover, not a fighter.

Next appintment: Tuesday, 1000 EST. Joy.

The packages waiting for me at home when I got back almost make up for the fact that teeth that weren't bothering me before are now hurting like a son of a bitch. Another CD from my Amazon order, a copy of the soundtrack to the game X-Men 2: Clone Wars for the Sega Genesis was waiting for me. Yes, one of the first soundtracks down by Kurt Harland of Information Society is now in my collection and being backed up by Leandra at this time. Also waiting for me was a long-overdue order from another gentleman in northern Virginia, an Information Society t-shirt from the Don't Be Afraid era along with a copy of the cassette single for How Long (off of Hack).

Of course, I'm wearing it right now. This shirt's going next to my Legion of Doom shirt in the closet for special occasions.

Definitely worth a read for a chuckle - the one and only Archie meets the Punisher comic ever made. Officially published, it lasted all of one issue.. no surprise. It's worth a look-see, though, if you like comics.

2006/01/31

Wow. Gee. Another all-nighter, this time with extra suck factor, in the form of Duo's cold. I hate my lives, sometimes.

In health care news that should make anyone sit up and take notice, over a dozen states are considering laws that will protect healthcare workers who do not want to provide their services to people because it would conflict with their personal belief systems. That's right.. these laws would make it legal for doctors to refuse you treatment because they feel that it would violate their personal morals (in violation of the Hippocratic Oath) and pharmacists to refuse to fill your scrip for the same reasons (imagine a Scientologist refusing to fill a prescription for antidepressants or the prescription for the morning-after pill being denied a rape victim). That's not all, though - in-vitro fertilisation could also fall into this category because it could be said to be "not natural". Bioethicists are going nuts over this because of how broad those laws are and what they could restrict: Take, for example, the possibility of a doctor refusing inoculation to a child because the vaccines are produced using bioengineered bacteria or stem cell tissue cultures.

Hmm.. just thought of something. A doctor who is a Satanist or a Thelemite could easily refuse to treat a Christian under those laws. Watch how fast the lawsuits would fly and the laws would be repealed if that ever happened..

Some weird stuff's been making its rounds lately - someone found something weird poking aorund Google Earth in the vicinity of Bicton, Australia. It looks for all the world like a car hanging in mid-air.. there are photographs of various sizes going around via e-mail and news articles, such as this story at SMH. The odd thing is that you can see other parked cars nearby, which gives a sense of proportion to the image. The anomaly also looks a bit bigger than the cars near it, which suggests that the car is elevated somehow. I did some poking around with Google Local and found the image; it's as zoomed as I can make it (if you try to go in closer you get the "We are sorry, but we don't have imagery at this zoom level for this region" error message). The Register got in contact with someone in Australia who went on-site to check it out for them, and found no signs of any funny business, just grass, trees, dirt, and a lot of air.

Weird.

0416 EST: Done with most of the work I wanted to get done, but now pushing a migraine from the pressure in my sinuses. Popping Excedrin, considering more extreme measures to get some sleep after dropping Lyssa off at work in a couple of hours. Planning a trip to CVS to get more Kleenex, cold and sinus medication, and other essentals.

Nasty dream during the couple of hours of sleep I managed to get last night before jacking in: I bit down on something (I think it was another tooth) and one of my molars (the one that's been giving me trouble for a few months) shattered, filling my mouth with bits of tooth and blood, that I spit out rather messily all over the place.

Making an appointment with the dentist tomorrow. Also looking up symbolism ("SSSSSSSSymbolism!!") of this dream. Very uneasy.

Making real progress coding. Should consider doing this more often.

0645 EST: Just discovered that a book I needed is at the office. If I go in today I'll get roped into working all day, too. Fuck.

0826 EST: Dropped Lyssa off at the Metro station. Found my book in the car. Bought cold medication, going to dope myself up and sleep this off.

2001 EST: Slept all day to recover. Feel much better now that the Excedrin is taking the edge off of the migraine.

..and what a thing to wake up to: There's a new budget cut bill, which Congress is calling a "budget reconciliation bill" which will cut student loans for every student such that they'll have to front at least another $2kus as well as crank up interest on federally subsidized student loans. This works out to a funding cut of 40%, or about $12.7bus. Use the 800 number on this website to call your local representative and ask them to not pass this bill.

The last time this happened, I had to leave college and work full time for a while before I could go back. I don't want to see this happen to anyone else if I can help it.

It's an 800 number, folks - call and leave a voice mail.

Here's a highly nontechnical FAQ that US citizens should read at least once: Frequently asked legal questions about NSA wiretaps.

Submitted for your approval: A memo about the US military's ability to collect information on civilians.

2006/01/30

In an attempt to clean up the Abramoff mess in Washington, DC, lawmakers are pushing George W. Bush to disclose who in the White House had been meeting with Jack