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Late last night, Lyssa and I got back to DC from southwestern Pennsylvania. The funeral service for Gandma Biscan was held at 0930 EST/EDT yesterday morning at the church on the outskirts of Mather, Pennsylvania. The family extant gathered at the Behm Funeral Home to pay their last respects to her before the casket was sealed and transported to the church for mass and the funeral ceremony. The priest who performed the ceremony did an excellent job and listened to the wishes and requests of the family (which was a concern of all concerned), has an excellent singing voice (I've never heard a priest join in the hymns before), and generally did an excellent job with the funeral. After mass was over we trucked out to the outskirts of town for a graveside ceremony (something I've never been to before), and then headed home to get ready for the wake.
There really isn't much that you can say about a wake.. family and close friends are gathered, clergy of some kind says some kind words and sings a few hymns, the funeral procession goes to a holy place of some kind for part II of the kind words and hymns, the casket is moved someplace else and interred. Unless something really out of the ordinary happens, there isn't much to write home about unless someone records it.
Once we got back to the homestead in Mather most everyone ditched their Sunday best clothing for more comfortable threads and set about getting ready for the wake, which involved just about everyone who attended the funeral, a large amount of food, a case of beer, and an emergency trip to pick up paper plates and flatware because Lyssa's mother insisted upon doing the dishes even though a wake is the last thing that you want a lot of cleanup for, because it could be said that a wake is itself a kind of cleanup operation.
Thankfully there is a tiny supermarket not too far away from the Mather homestead, so it was the work of a few minutes to run out there in the TARDIS, buy them out of picnicware, and head home to stop the impending carnage.
The wake was more than I'd expected.. everyone interacted meaningfully, instead of the usual aftershocks of someone close dying. Everyone sat around eating, chatting, laughing, finding out about how life's been going.. it was a very upbeat affair, as wakes go. The food was excellent (you have to love a Polish wake), I met some more folks in the family, and I generally got along with everyone.. again, not much that one can say about that without making a transcript of everything that happened, and causing trouble is the last thing that I want to do.
After the wake wrapped up and everyone either went home or curled up to take a nap because no one had been sleeping well, Lyssa, Jill, and I headed over to Grandma Biscan's place to pick through everything in the daylight and select a few things to take with us. We were able to do a much more thorough job of searching because it was mid afternoon and well lit (the power had been shut off previously). We found a lot of nifty stuff, to be sure, like the contents of Grandfather Biscan's cabinet (which, I found out later, was actually a gun rack), more books hidden away upstairs (I took with me a pair of history texts originally written by H.G.Wells, a duck-and-cover manual from the 60's, a book of etiquette, and some old documentation on a brand-new medium, FM radio, to see if docs have gotten smarter or dumber in the past eighty years (hint: It's not the former)), and even some 78 records.
The pantry and larder are, to be frank, scary. None of us are sure how old the food is or how long it's been there, only that we're not prepared to open anything under any circumstances. We marvelled over the old-lady trait of hiding paper towels everywhere and collecting doilies like baseball cards (I maintain that union regulations require women to begin stockpiling doilies once they reach the age of seventy). We found a large number of silver and bronze Catholic saint medallions in a small carved wooden box ("Hey, look.. I found your grandmother's stash!") in the bedroom along with a large number of old photographs and a beautiful leather-bound heirloom Bible, complete with red text, glossary, and a partial family tree handwritten in the back. We also took with us some small glass jars that would be ideal for decanting oils and a pair of large lamps that will probably shed more light than all of the bulbs we have set up in the apartment at this time.
I think it was around 1700 EST that we set forth for Washington, DC once again, in the hopes of missing rush hour traffic on the beltway. We stopped off once to stretch our legs and get water (because both of us were badly dehydrated) and again an hour or so later to get dinner at a Macaroni Grill not far from where route 70 turns into route 270. All told, we made it home around 2230 EST last night and after unloading the TARDIS turned in for the night to sleep in our own bed for the first time in several days.
I wound up sleeping in until 0930 EST this morning.. my body was completely exhausted and I really haven't been eating right lately, so recuperation from all of the travelling has been slow. We've already pulled our RSVP from the Edgar Allen Poe memorial picnic this weekend - both of us just want to stay at home and rest.
Here's one for the record books - roboticists in the United States have begun devising tentacles for robots instead of clawed manipulators because they work better with handling oddly shaped objects. The tentacles are modelled after the trunks of elephants and the tentacles of certain cephalopods, and are pneumatically actuated instead of operated with electric motors. So far, these new actuators are only a metre in length, but even that is enough to serve as a proof of concept mechanism.
This is awesome, I daresay - someone made a fanvid of the Time War!
I'm of two minds about wandering through the houses of the dead.
On one hand, they're not mine, and ordinarily I much prefer to be invited in to feel completely comfortable in someone else's home.. there's this whole being where I'm not supposed to be thing, you see, though that's conditioning from a time where I barely ever left the house. But now I'm getting off track.
On the other hand, I get a strange sort of.. I can't quite call it 'pleasure' doing so, but I've always enjoyed wandering through the houses while they were quiet. It's like being inside of a photograph: Everything is quiet and still. There isn't anyone else in the house to move things around after you've walked through. There usually isn't any sound because the air conditioning is off, the television is off, sometimes the power's off... everything is exactly as it was and exactly as it will always be until someone opens the door, goes in, and starts going through everything, which is never a pleasant thing to do after someone dies, for a variety of reasons. It's a chance to go through everything that you were never allowed to touch before and see what they kept, what they never got around to throwing out, what was forgotten behind the couch and in the back of the dresser drawers... some pretty odd stuff accumulates, which is why I particularly enjoy doing so - all the strange knick-knacks.
Last night after leaving Aunt Sylvie's place we drove over to Grandma Biscan's place to look for a few missing items, namely, some books that the wherabouts of were unknown. Sylvie gave us the keys and we entered via the front door, like civilised entities. The house, as one would expect, was cool, all but silent, and dark.. walking in, you would get the impression in a short time that the original owner was no more. Not scary, exactly, but it felt like the house was keeping a close eye on us and what we did while we were there. We spent some time searching around the bottom floor for said books but didn't find what we were after until we scaled the precariously steep stairs to the second floor, where two attic/bedrooms packed with boxes and dressers (which seem to be the primary mode of storage of the generations before ours) flanked the staircase that had neither headroom nor bannister for support.
That staircase still gives me the screaming heebie jeebies. I always feel like I'm going to knock my head on a doorframe (which I did last night), fall, and splatter the contents of my cranium all over the worn yellow carpeting and kitchen floor.
The books were found neatly packed away in a box in the first attic/bedroom we shined our tiny LED flashlight into. Most of them are in good condition but there is one, a cookbook, which is bound in the traditional heirloom manner but quite old. The pages are yellowing, the scotch tape used to repair a few of them has long since crumbled to dust, leaving only dark brown rectangular smears of synthetic colloidian to hold the edges together, the edges of the pages themselves are badly oxidised, and a few of the individual leaves are so thin you'd think that they'd crumble if you touched them. Lyssa and I plan to scan this book (which will unfortunately destroy it, but if I can round up a hand held scanner or rig up a jig for my digital camera to photograph the pages, it might hang on another few years) to record the recipes and margin notes therein and have the book mothballed if we can find someplace that'll do it for us. It is a beautiful old book, and it will be a shame if the recipes are lost because it crumbles.
We did a little more poking around and found Grandma Biscan's button box, which Lyssa used to play with when she was younger. Some of the buttons are so old that they crumble when touched, and a few are even made of cast copper (so known becuase they've turned green and are also decaying). I think that most of the buttons will survive, they'll just need to be cleaned. Lyssa mentioned wanting to preserve the tin itself, because it's an antique. Honestly, I'm not sure of how to do that. The rust will definitely have to be buffed off, and something will have to be applied to seal the enamel on and keep the moisture away from the metal. A dessicant of some kind will definitely have to be kept with the tin to retard the oxidation process - I think the traditional lump of chalk will do nicely.
Got some coding done last night; I finally sat down to turn one of my more practical ideas into a Perl script, so Signature Generator v1.0 is now available to the public under the GPL. I've got a few more ideas (I seem to get my best ideas in the shower, go figure) for features to add to the script, so I'll probably release v1.1 soon.
Something that's been bothering me lately is how difficult it's been to write coherent updates. My brain's going in many directions simultaneously right now,because there's just so much going on, and I haven't been taking the time out to line my thoughts up and get them out in some fashion sequentially. I took some time out to code last night, which I greatly enjoyed and which cleared my head so that I can think. Coding feels a little like writing to me but the two are not all that similiar. One is a narrative of some kind, another is the creation of a list of commands to carry out in some sort of order. The reason I like programing is because it lets me express myself in a manner that is as linear or nonlinear as I choose - code code code.. jump to the end of the file and write a subroutine or two, then get out of the sidebar and go back and code some more, then page up a few times to fill out some logic that I missed the first time around.. you can jump around when programming, and in fact this is a good and desirable thing.
Writing a narrative (like this memory log update) can work like that but I find it very confusing to upload memories in such a way that they were written out of sequence. Of course, when using a text editor to write it's very possible to scroll back, edit a little, go back.. it just feels too odd to me to scroll around editing what are, in a very real sense, parts of my memories. That, and I think that if I used a larger Xterm than 80x25 it might be easier but that's just stubbornness that I need to work on.
Okay. Enough about that.
I've got a few dozen photographs dating back to February that I need to finish editing and put online. Gotta do that soon..
The first funerary showing today was early in the afternoon, between 1400 and 1600 EST/EDT. Lyssa and I got up early because Aunt Sylvia had asked us to help her cook.. what we didn't realise was that she had gotten up a few hours before we did and got everything done that needed done.
With nothing better to do, we headed to the local Sheetz to pick up breakfast sandwiches and coffee and generally make our time of wakefulness usable in some fashion. While waiting for my bagel sandwich, I noticed that much of the hardware there, namely, the cash registers, PIN pads, and touchscreen ordering systems were all hooked together using bright yellow CAT-5 cable, all of it neatly ziptied together and vanishing in the back office. I also noticed a wireless access point (probably 802.11b) mounted to the front wall of the store and hooked up with the very same yellow nework cable. It goes to show that even when you're all the way out in the sticks, just a half hour from the border, you can still find neat things if you keep your eyes open.
The first showing wasn't very well attended beause most of the family and friends you'd expect were working during the day, but the closest folks came to pay their last respects. Grandma Biscan looks good.. the mortician did an excellent job of making her up. She really does look a good fifteen to twenty years younger. Definitely better than the last time I saw her. What caught my attention was her hands, though.. they look the same as last time, even if her face was artfully done. I've never thought about it before, but I felt today what they mean when they say that someone's skin is waxy. It's cold, much colder than one is accustomed to feeling from a pair of human hands.. not to criticise the mortician, it's just one of those things that stands out when you least expect it to.
The usual sorts of familial drama during a time of mourning are also appearing more or less on schedule. I don't want to embarass anyone or wreak any havoc (even though it would be interesting to do so), so I will only say that sometimes tempers flare and tongues sharpen to an uncomfortable degree.
By the time the showing was over, most everyone had headed home to recuperate for a time. Lyssa and I ran out to get a few things while her mother heated up dinner for all of us, shell pasta stuffed with creamed chicken made by a friend of hers, which was a warming and tasty dinner on a day where the skies were grey and overcast and the highest temperature recorded today was in the low sixties (Farenheit). A few short hours later we got dressed up in our Sunday best once more and headed back to the funeral home for the later viewing between 1900 and 2100 EST/EDT. More family and not a few close friends came to this particular showing, which made it, I think, a lot harder on everyone. I wound up talking to a few of Lyssa's mother's crazy friends outside while smoking a cigarette, don't ask me how...
I'm pretty wiped out after today. Lyssa and Marie went off around 2030 EST/EDT tonight, while headed back to read for a while, write, and catch up. The funeral starts tomorrow at 0930 EST/EDT, followed by the requisite dinner and then probably our trip back to Virignia.
So I can't stay away... Signature Generator is up to v1.1 now.
Another interview with Gary McKinnon was posted by the BBC, in which he talks a bit about the methods he used and what, exactly, he was looking for.
I don't have much time to write right now.. Kash and the Lost Boys are still here. I did a lot of running around yesterday getting ready for the funeral on Tuesday, including some shopping, finding stuff to make dinner tonight (it's well into spring and apple cider is getting hard to find), driving Lyssa to and from the mall to get stuff.. I also had a hell of a time finding a dry cleaner in the area that isn't a complete scam. So-called one-day dry cleaning places aren't, at least in northern Virginia. The proprietrix of the first place I went to even took my clothes, a suit and a pair of pants that are in dire need of cleaning due to carrying large amounts of cat hair and threw them into a bag, only to dump them out onto the counter when I asked her if I could get my suit back before Wednesday (Lyssa and I are heading for Pennsylvania tomorrow night).This resulted in a mostly clean suit that is now wrinkled and covered with cat hair. The next two places I went to were similiarly unhelpful, and in fact took up a good two hours of my time that could have been spent doing something more useful, like doing the dishes at home.
While Lyssa napped this afternoon I took Duo, Hiro, and Kash out for ice cream, and wound up at the frozen custard place on the other side of Vienna, Virginia (the place that we found a few months ago during a Saturday afternoon on the town). Service there was remarkably slow this evening; I waited a good ten minutes for a cup of mediocre coffee. An afternoon jaunt turned into a pretty major trip due to how long it took to get anything from the counter. I opted to pass on the yummy looking frozen custard because a real dinner was coming up, and I'd rather have something good for me than something that's tasty but going to take another couple of years off my life.
Lyssa made her famous pork tenderloin for dinner tonight using some of the hot and sweet seasoning mix she'd ordered last week (from the same place that my mother had gotten that care package from over Yule, in fact) - it's amazingly good, and believe you me, when you use that stuff as a rub before baking, the flavour will NOT change overmuch by the time it's done. At least for the hot and sweet seasoning mix, I recommend keeping a glass of milk nearby to give your taste buds a rest.
A few other things have been going on lately but I'm being asked to go to bed. I'll write more later, as time permits.
Unfortunately, we didn't game last night due to how the week went. I didn't have time to write a proper adventure for the game that was supposed to be last night, mostly due to the fact that I was working on a sidebar adventure (a seeking, if you're familiar with Mage) with Hasufin via e-mail for most of the week and wrapped it up Thursday night. Maybe next weekend..
Most of last night after dinner was spent lounging around with Hasufin, Kash, Duo, and Mika.. somehow or another we wound up debating some of the lesser spoken of practical aspects of bionic reconstruction technologies, namely, how much they'd be likely to cost and what all would go into making them cheap enough for widespread use.
This morning Lyssa and I got up far earlier than normal for a Sunday to get everything together to return to Pennsylvania. While Duo and Kash packed their stuff up Lyssa and I yanked most everything out of the kitchen and cleaned things up because the apartment complex was sending exterminators in (which they do every Spring and Fall) on Monday to do their thing.. this requires everything dealing with food be removed from the area. We wound up moving the contents of the kitchen into the bedroom primarily and the library when we ran out of space (well, not so much 'out of space' as 'where can we put the microwave?') and then getting ready to hit the road. Surprisingly, it took less than two hours to get everything moved, get packed, and get the TARDIS going. Lyssa stopped off to pick up her medication as I gassed up (gas prices in northern Virginia broke $3us per gallon this week - ouch!) and threw out the junk that's been accumulating in the back seat.
We ran the TARDIS through the car wash down the road from our apartment complex and then stopped off for lunch at the Dominion Deli, not too far off from the beltway on-ramp.
Wonderful food.. but holy cats, it can lay a powerful hurt on you.
I ordered something simple that I've not had in a while, a black bean
vegetable burger, chips fries, and a cup of chili for lunch.
What I recieved, which I didn't expect, was a hand-made black bean veggie
burger that was hot off the griddle and still soft, steak fries the width of my
Swiss army knife, and a full bowl of chili.
Needless to say, I couldn't finish all of it, and didn't even try. My stomach, unused to vegetarian fare, complained the entire way back to Pennsylvania about the sudden influx of unfamiliar proteins and starches, which only settled down about two hours ago, well after arrival. All told, it took us about three and a half hours to make it to Pennsylvania and Lyssa's parents' place, thanks to a shortcut through the mountains that is obvious once you know what you're looking for.
We haven't had much time to do anything since we got here, only enough to get the TARDIS unloaded, pay a visit to close relatives, and go through grandma Biscan's place to find some requested items.
"A feast for fire and a feast for water; a feast for life and a greater feast for death!"
Late last night, Lyssa's grandmother quietly went beyond. She was not conscious for it, she only slowly stopped breathing. Lyssa's aunt was there with her when she passed.
We'll be returning for the funeral tomorrow night.
The Law of Fives is never wrong.
The Department of Homeland Security is doing a bang-up job of keeping airports safe these days with their passenger screening system - it's so good that they're making air travel a living hell for State Department diplomats, dozens of folks with valid US security clearances, 82 year old veterans, and enlisted officers of the US armed forces. They still won't tell anyone how or why they pick the folks they do, only that once you're on the list you're on it for the rest of your life. A few of the people who called up various offices to complain were threatened by those offices - in one case, a woman was told to be careful of what she was saying on the phone or she'd be getting a visit when she least expected it.
I'm double-plus proud to live in this country, what about you?
Donald Rumsfeld is accused of lying by a former CIA analyst on CNN.
No, it's safe for work.. someone's made a short film out of a famous sci-fi short story about sentient machines wondering how in the hell an organic entity can think. it's cute.. if you've taken an AI class, you've probably heard it. If not, sit down and give it a watch. It's cute.
The Electronic Frontiers Foundation set up a petition against the RIAA, which continues to extort thousands of dollars from people they think are sharing .mp3 files.. like 70 year old grandmothers who don't even own computers, twelve year olds, and folks who are almost living on the street because they're selling everything they have to settle because they can't afford lawyers to defend themselves. Please sign it and bring a stop to this extortion scheme.
Here's an interesting and frightening report on the state of free speech on the net today. I suggest that everyone at least read the precis and think on it a while.
Oh, the humanity... virus checkers fooled because a single variable name was changed.
It's amazing what you can do when you pick up a boarding pass and start digging a little.
I suck.
I suck.
I suck!
I learned something very important today.
When working on one's firewall remotely, never, under any circumstances, interrupt your firewall script when it's in the middle of running. This will stop it at a bad time, such as between the time that the rules have been erased from memory and the default policy of drop 'em all and let $DEITY sort it out has been applied and the rules that allow access of any kind to services behind the firewall have been applied on top of the default policy.
I made that mistake this morning.
.....
Well, fuck me and marry me young.
I just found out what I'd been doing wrong.
When you register a domain with one of the big registrars, like Network Solutions, you have to register DNSes, Domain Name Servers, with your registrar. The idea is that when you set up your domain, you have to give the registrar the IP addresses of your DNSes as well as the hostnames of your DNSes (which go into your zone files to say that those servers are authoritative, i.e., The Ones To Talk To). If you change the names of your DNSes, you have to go back to your registrar and change the hostnames they have on file.
You also have to do that if you change the IP addresses of your DNSes but leave the hostnames the same.
Guess what I didn't do when I moved the Network back to my apartment.
Altered DNS records tend to take about eight hours to propagate across the global Net. Everything should be right as rain, as the saying has it, by then.
Yes, I know... problems with DNS lately. Some servers out there are caching IP addresses that haven't been used since late 2005 for the Network's hosts (they aren't even mine!), and I'm trying to run down what the hell's happening. Speakeasy is helping me troubleshoot what's going on.
Here's an interesting article about something you might not have considered before: Folks in embargoed countries keeping touch with the rest of the world with MMORPGs, like World of Warcraft. Folks in countries like Iraq, North Korea, and Cuba are players of these services, even though US law states that countries can't make their products available to them (not that this really stops anyone on the Net who gets hold of the software and actually pays their monthly fee one way or another). Technically, the companies based out of the US that run MMORPGs can't allow them to play but as long as the money comes from an account in a country that isn't embargoed, there isn't much that they can really do. There are even reports of people who claim to be stationed overseas playing during their downtime over military networks, the firewalls of which they've managed to figure a way around.
A couple of days ago, Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska tried to force through a bill that would gut and reconstruct the US telecommunications laws that would also have added a number of dubious provisions because they were hidden way down in the Flyspeck 3 text. Cable franchising law would have been jettisoned, which would directly benefit AT&T and Verizon by allowing them to enter the cable television industry thirty days after the bill passed as well as eliminating cable rate regulations all across the board. Text that would implement the Broadcast Flag laws that we've been fighting for years was also slipped into the fine print of the bill, which would have been a low blow.
Pete Ashdown, professional geek, former rave DJ, and founder of the first indie ISP in the state of Utah is gunning for the Senate position held by Senator Orrin Hatch, who is widely said to be a representative of Disney and not Utah due to the bills he supports and their origins. Hatch sponsored the DMCA and went on the record that he'd like to make it legal to destroy the computers of file sharers a few years ago, which didn't do much to endear him to the Net. Ashdown, on the other hand, supports the rights of artists and users first and corporations second and opposes Digital Rights Management technologies.
Definitely an individual to keep an eye on.
They want to remake Revenge of the Nerds. Sad.
There is at this time a petition before the US Court of Appeals downtown which asks that corporate and school networks be subject to CALEA, which is going to drive a large number of sysadmins utterly mad because of all the changes that would have to be made to their respective infrastructures to make it possible for law enforcement to silently wiretap any and all traffic at the drop of a hat. The FCC ruling of last year extended CALEA to broadband ISPs and VoIP companies, but didn't make a distinction between public and private networks.. therein lies the rub. If that CALEA ruling is ruled to extend to private networks, then potentially any computer network that moves a decent amount of data (such as a school's residential network) would have to be made CALEA compliant. There is even talk of requiring hardware supplied by schools to be CALEA compliant, which would give any academic admin roaring hives because of how much money it would cost to retrofit everything.
A few days ago the Defense Security Service announced to defense contractors that they aren't accepting requests for security clearances anymore due to fiscal reasons. Maybe their budget won't allow them to do so many background checks anymore.
WIPO, the United Nations' World Intellectual Property Organisation is meeting this week in Geneva, Switzerland, and they're working on the Broadcast Treaty again. The latest version of said treaty gives broadcasting organisations 50 copyright over the content they handle, regardless of how it might be licensed originally. The Broadcast Treaty also mandates the implementation of broadcast flag technology in every country that it covers, which means that someone else gets to tell you what you can do with what you watch on TV at night. Someone got the bright idea to put webcasting of all kinds back into the treaty, which covers streaming audio and video and probably podcasting of both kinds as well (they're still trying to decide that). The way it's being pitched this time around, anyone who webcasts can apply for the same rights and privileges that the big media companies would have as long as you register with WIPO.
The first batch of hardware for Leandra's upgrade, a new mainboard and graphics card, has been ordered. It should come in in a few days' time, at which time I'll then start sharking for a good price on a dual-core CPU.
Remember this?
29,105,039 hits. Time for some follow-up.
Speaking of follow-up, or in this case follow through, the US government allocated $243mus to construct health clinics in Iraq to take care of the folks who were without resources of any kind or who had been injured in the fighting. Of the 150 that had been planned and promised only twenty are actually done, and even those are looking pretty shabby. The report written by the GAO has lots of excuses in it, such as the local contractors welshing on the deals and lack of materials, but there's also the matter of the money just going missing. Inspections were mostly done from passing cars. There's also the matter of equipment purchased going missing... of over 9700 assault rifles purchased, for example, only 3,015 are accounted for. Where'd the other ones go? Nobody knows.
Richard M. Stallman is charging for autographs now?
A good news article on the recent resurgance of diseases that most people should have been vaccinated for years ago.
The number of secret not-quite-search warrants National
Security Letters, which allowed the FBI to gather information on citizens, from
their banking records to their net.traffic: 3,501 and climbing.
Overclocking the Super Nintendo.
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Just a quick question before I head off to bed: At Midnight tonight with Hasufin and Butterfly, I heard a rumour that Iris would be playing somewhen around 4 July 2006 at Nation before it closed for good. I don't know if this is actually going to happen or not - it's not on their website.. but it IS on the website for Nation/Alchemy. 4 July 2006 at Freaks United 2006.
Iris is playing DC again.
That strange keening sound you now hear is me squeeing like a rabid Fullmetal Alchemist fangirl walking in on some hot cosplay nookie.
We are so there.
Okay. Off to bed now. I'll write about what's been going on lately tomorrow when I wake up.
Okay... Friday afternoon I got Lyssa to the Metro station to head to her brother's place so they could drive back to Pittsburgh to see their grandmother. Grandma Biscan's a tough lady; she's held on tooth and nail and while she hasn't gotten better, exactly, she's holding on to life with every limb she can spare. I haven't heard anything more about how she's doing.. Lyssa and Grant have been taking turns spending time with her, and are making sure that their parents and aunt go home and get both good food (as opposed to hospital food, which seems designed to keep people there for as long as possible) and rest.
This isn't an easy time.
I slept most of Friday. I pulled a few all-nighters for work last week, which turned my sleep schedule upside down and seemed to have absconded with a few essential parts of my consciousness, those most strongly associated with the left hemisphere of the brain. I slept most of Friday, leaving only to do a little shopping and run to the bank to take care of a few things. After dropping Lyssa off and hanging out with Ellen for a bit (she was in the area and dropped a few things off for Lyssa) I curled up for another circadian rhythm destroying nap, only to be awakened early in the evening by a page from Hasufin, who wanted to know what I was doing that night.
I wasn't doing anything in particular, so we headed out to Amphora to get dinner and relax for the first time in a while. One thing about late night maintenance runs, you can't really relax during them unless you want things to go horribly wrong. You really need to be on your game. Another thing is that it's very difficult to relax afterward. Eventually, we settled on a night of strawberry daqueries and anime. We planned on relaxing Friday night, knocking back a few, and watching something interesting.
After getting a few disks burned we got our poisons of choice ready and sat
back to watch Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children
All told, around 0130 EST/EDT on Saturday, we had to call it a night because both of us had lifestyle maintenance to take care of. I dragged myself out of bed six hours later to wake up, get cleaned up, and head to the apartment complex's main office to pick up a package and renew our lease for another year so we could get the smaller of two possible rent hikes. The renewal didn't take long at all, just a moment. Finding the package in the back office took a while longer but went smoothly.
The package in question was one of the taxtime inventory clearout surprise
packages sold as a special by A Different Drum records a few weeks ago. Thirty CDs for $30us is a good deal, and
there's a lot of good stuff in there, some of it rather rare. Included there
was a copy of volume three of Cosmicity: The Pure Sessions
I can't wait to hear Spray's cover of Mean Green Mother From Outer Space.
I mostly hung around the apartment on Saturday, cleaning stuff up, putting stuff away, and catching up on my reading.. Mark and Butterfly arrived at Hausfin's place a little before 1700 local time, so I got changed and walked down there, only to discover that I didn't know exactly when we'd be heading out to Midnight.... one might say that I was a little overdressed for killing a few hours.
We wound up driving into Maryland to go to The Crystal Fox, which is a pagan supply store in Maryland which is surprisingly well stocked... their book collection is excellent, with a much lower fluff-to-useful stuff ratio than I'm used to and a diverse array of just about everything else. By that, I mean that your average Joe or Jane walking down the street exploring will probably find something interesting that they'll be up for purchasing, which you don't really get at all with stores that cater to this particular subculture.
I picked up yet another book (Magick of Reiki by Christopher Penczak
After dinner and a quick trip on the beltway back home, we dropped Mark off to go home, because he's not much of a club-goer, and got dressed to go out and headed for the metro station by way of an ATM or two and a side trip to help a woman who was in need of a tank of gas to get to Richmond.
I'm expecting payback one way or another. Money would be nice but on my way back to Hasufin's car I stopped to have a little chat with the CPU of her car's engine... but enough about that.
The trip on the Metro to go downtown was about an hour in length as the bridge and tunnel folks headed home for the night to do whatever it is that they do on the weekends. Finding Midnight was surprisingly easy: Get off the Metro at Farragut North, make a right at the corner, and it'll be on the other side of the street. Midnight reminds me a lot of Babylon, a club in Pittsburgh that I used to go to in the early 1990's... it's in the basement of a building, it's dark, it's lit with ice-blue Christmas bulbs and neon, and it's cozy. The folks there are by and large very friendly (I met four or five people within minutes of walking in the door because they recognised my TARDIS key pendant), the music is excellent (where else can you hear the Hora followed by Iris?), and the club, once you learn where everything is, is easily navigable.
Butterfly, true to form, ran into three or four people she knew from other places (it seemed like you couldn't swing a cat without hitting two or three OTO members on Saturday) but spent a good portion of the night on the dance floor. I did my fair share of cutting a rug down there last night, also... Hasufin, new to the area, spent most of his time people watching and somehow managing to get free drinks for us (which I had to decline, seeing as how I had my money's worth of Goldschlager in me for the night).
We headed out around 0130 EST this morning because the Metro closes somewhen around 0200 or 0300, and we had to get home to get a decent amount of sleep because all of us have been unusually busy these past few days.
Since when is it possible that a bill doesn't have to pass both House and Senate to become a law?
Yes, I'm working another all-nighter tonight.
Remember helpwinthisbet.com? The counter is nearly at 3,000,000 hits as of 0232 EST.
MacGyver really can fix anything... even lag in World of Warcraft.
When you've got a crisis that has to be handled, chances are you'll call in a professional or two if the problem's outside of your sphere of influence; this is practically SOP in the corporate world, especially when it comes to security breaches of one kind or another. Most companies these days, to be frank, don't have their own CSIRTs (computer security incident response teams). In the state of Georgia, a law was just passed (but not yet activated) which requires everyone who does freelance investigation work to be licensed as a private investigator.. this includes information security consultants, freelance or not due to how the Georgia state government defines a private investigator. How many info.sec folks have the background they're calling for and the certification? I'm willing to bet not bloody many of them. The reason this came about was because an information forensics specialist named Scott Moulton was supposed to go to court earlier this month in connection with a case he was working on, and the prosecution managed to get his testimony excluded because he wasn't licensed as a PI. The Georgia Association of Professional Private Investigators stated that if someone was to examine evidence, analyze it, and testify in court then that someone had to have a PI license.
This does not bode well for information security down there. Firstly, this puts a run on the supply of info.sec professionals down there at a time where net.crime is a serious problem. Secondly, the status of info.sec professionals called in from other states to work is now in question. Both of these leave a large number of companies in the state of Georgia up a certain creek without a means of propulsion in the event that they get hit. Thirdly, even if all of them did set up a CSIRT to handle stuff like this, would the evidence even be admissible unless their CSIRT folks were licensed PI's?
The Four Quarters Farm in Pennsylvania has set up a web database for ride sharing.
FEMA did such a piss-poor job during Hurricane Katrina that a Senate committee is talking about dismantling it. Conspiracy theorists, embarassed that their favourite arm of the New World Order(tm) is about as threatening as a water weenie, are still scrambling to find another organisation to keep a nervous eye on.
The EFF has published another protest ad to the content control companies of the world.
Mental note: Set up an NNTP-to-SMTP gateway on Lucien. The idea of having a mailing list called "alt.sex.bondage.hamsters.and.duct.tape (at) hostname.net" strikes me as funny.
Remember a couple of days ago when it came out that the state of South Carolina was trying to ban sex toys? G. Ralph Davenport, Junior, the Representative behind this measure, is trying to amend section 24-3-20(a) of the 1976 code of South Carolina to make it legal to ship drug offenders to prisons in other countries. Smoke a joint, lose your citizenship and wind up in jail somewhere else. Is it just me, or am I the only one having Midnight Express flashbacks?
Here's the command I'm running on all of my shell servers: for ((;;)) ; do wget -O- http://www.helpwinthisbet.com/ > /dev/null && sleep 15 ; done
An artist chronocled making a cover for a reprint of War of the Worlds. Awesome use of random stuff.
This is hardcore: Webcomic tattoos.
Wow.. sage advice for twenty-somethings in the twenty-first century. A lot of this stuff is common sense, but popular culture has a strange way of stripping one of all common sense, as it relates to one's day to day life in the year 2006 of the common era. Yes, it's from Kuro5hin; that doesn't mean that you should immediately ignore it because it's known for having enough sarcasm to make a bard cry.
Something very odd happened in the area this week. Someone at some company was diagnosed with http://kidshealth.levinechildrenshospital.org/parent/infections/bacterial_viral/mumps.html">mumps, and is in the hospital for treatment. The individual's office and personal effects (I'm not naming names because I wouldn't out the individual even if I knew his/her name) have been decontaminated, but still everyone is advised to not enter said office.
Mumps?!
When last I checked, children had to be vaccinated for measles, mumps, and rubella (the MMR vaccination sequence) before they could even go to school most everywhere in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control maintain a database of laws by state, in fact. My home state of Pennsylvania as well as the state of Virginia require the MMR sequence, as well as a number of other innoculations before one can attend school. I find it very odd that there are people that were not vaccinated in this day and age. Unless you can produce the paperwork you can't go to school, it's as simple as that.
Logically, just about every adult of working age these days should also have been vaccinated.
I've heard no rumours of new strains of the virus that causes mumps, so I feel that the possibility of an existing immunisation failing are remote; I've not yet done a great deal of research on this but I think that it'll support that statement.
There are three kinds of death, it is said: Heart death, brain death, and being off the Net.
Leandra, due to a loose connector, and hence I, were suffering from a slight case of the third kind. We got better.
When I first moved down to DC, I was living in Maryland and commuting to and from work every day. My average travel time was ninety minutes each way, which is a lot when you consider the fact that it was a journey of only twenty-seven miles. Early in the morning it wasn't unusual to see people reading the paper, talking on the phone, drinking coffee, or eating breakfast because no one was actually going anywhere. When you're stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic and moving maybe one mile each hour (distance, not speed), you can do that without too much trouble. There are, however, people whose commute makes my mine look like a trip to the corner for milk - folks so busy that they won't even stop off for coffee unless there are less than three people waiting in line. People so busy that they absolutely cannot stop to do anything until they hit the traffic jam because they know that they'll be stuck there, sometimes for hours at a time. All this to make it to work at 0800... and back home about twelve hours later. Appointments are being thrown to hell as a result, also; some people can't make it unless it's before 0500 or well into the evening, after everyone's already home. Businesses are catering to a lifestyle where most of your life is spent either at work or en route to or from work: Fast food is booming, and products designed to sit in or on dashboards to make it easier to eat on the road. Sheetz has started installing keypads to order at their gas pumps in certain metropolitan areas so that you can order, fill up on petrol, and get your food without having to wait for it.
Ask yourself this: Is it all worth it? Is it worth it to run yourself into the ground every week just to go to work, and not even for overtime at that? Why do we put ourselves through it? There are viable options these days so that many people, though not all (let's be realistic here) don't have to go through this. More and more people telecommute, and to good effect. The only reason that people feel they have to work 0800-1700 is simply convention: You can get just as much done if you work from 2000 until 0400, for example. Same with 0200-1200 (which is what I wind up doing from time to time, though not due to my (much shorter, these days) commute).
Something that I think we'll start seeing in the next five years are more companies cutting deals with the owners of apartment complexes and hotels to put up workers in the evenings. Some bigger companies, like Amazon (I've been told) require certain elements of their staff, if they have on-call duty, to be within thirty minutes' driving time from the facility; sometimes this means that those workers are put up in nearby hotels to ensure that thirty-minute trip in case of an emergency. Seeing as how more and more companies are shooting for five-nines uptime (99.999% availability) and putting staff on-call with a time limit, perhaps this will become a more commonly used tactic. Perhaps making corporate housing more common will happen for the same reason. Companies have less and less problem making available to their workers exercise space, showers, and sometimes even room to crash after a long shift, this would be the next logical step.
The University of Texas at Austin was cracked again, this time to the tune of 197,000 pilfered student records. They don't know how many records had Social Security numbers in them..
After spending the afternoon with my folks at the old homestead on Saturday afternoon, I packed up a few boxes of stuff from my old lab (most of my models and some collectibles, a bag or two of parts, and my synthesizer(!)), loaded it all into the TARDIS, and set off for the city core and the House of Pendragon, where I met up with Alexius and Diane, who I haven't seen in far too long (I rarely seem to hook up with folks when I go back for the weekend). We planned to go to dinner that night with Lyssa but difficulties in location required us to change our plans slightly to make it all work. It wouldn't have made any sense to drive out to Lyssa's folks' place, pick up Lyssa, drive back to Pittsburgh, meet up with 'lex and Diane.. so I met up with 'lex and Diane and we caravaned out to the Pennsylvania/West Virginia border to pick up Lyssa, who was sound asleep by the time we arrived around 1820 EST.
We wound up heading into Waynesburg to go to Groovy's (46 South Morris Street; Waynesburg, PA; 15370), which is a tiny, very hard to find restaurant on a side street that serves food of various sorts (you've got Mexican, American, Italian, and seafood on the menu, and they are known locally for their deep fried dill pickle spears (which are excellent, in my opinion)). Lyssa was still mostly asleep so we had to drive around for a half-hour or so until we found Groovy's, but once we did we got in about an hour before they started to close up for the night. We ordered our meals (try their Mexican if you find your way there through some stroke of luck) and sat there for a few hours, eating, talking, and laughing. Catching up with one another and having a good time. I can't think of a better way to spend a Saturday night.
Groovy's: One and one-half flareguns. The service is attentive and helpful, the food is great, and the deep fried pickles are to die for (they're definitely not good for your heart). My biggest, and only gripe, to be honest, is trying to find the place. Go here if you're in southwestern Pennsylvania, down by the border.
We eventually decided that I was going to head home early on Sunday while Lyssa and Grant went back to the hospital to spend more time with their grandmother. I understand why the family doesn't want me there - their grandmother isn't in good health and, to be frank, she's away more than she's in her body, and a new face would probably be scary for her. Still, I wish that I could have seen her.. I left around 1130 EST Sunday morning and took the scenic route back down to DC, arriving around 1430 EST ultimately. On the way down, I saw a good bit of West Virginia and the rural part of northern Virginia. It's very pretty land, with lots of open, blue sky and warm wind. I noticed something as I was heading south: The foliage there is badly damaged, and does not appear to be growing back. For every tree that showed green leaves or a full complement of pine needles, there were at least ten other trees that were, in short, dead. Stripped bare and bone-white where the bark's either fallen off or been torn away. You don't see much grass down that way, either, instead lots of bare, cracked soil. The land alongside the highways looks and feels dead. Even farther back, you'll see more dead deciduous trees than you will live trees of any sort, and patchy masses of what appears to be regular lawn grass. It felt very sad, very lonely. Very still, regardless of the traffic heading in both directions.I will also say that I couldn't see very far back, for reasons which are obvious when you're the driver of a car moving at 70 miles per hour down a two lane highway (70 is the standard posted speed limit in those areas, to lay some of your fears to rest and awaken new ones). The plant life in those areas could very well be healthier once you get away from the roadside, what with all the dust kicked up and vehicle exhaust, laden with toxins of all kinds.
Once I made it past the Eastern Continental Divide (elevation: 2610 feet; location: Somewhere in West Virginia) something over the hill caught my eye and gave me hope: Someone's been planting conifers out there and appears to be taking good care of them. The dead trees are being cut down and hauled away and neat rows of pines dot the landscape. It might be a Christmas tree farm, but something tells me that at least some of those trees are going to be left alone.
After I got home and unloaded the TARDIS, I headed out again to do some
grocery shopping for the week to come. In all, I hit all but one grocery store
in the area to find what I needed, which took a couple of hours. After getting
home and putting the groceries away, I took some time out to read a bit and work
on some research that I've been doing. At the same time, I finally watched the
almost-three-hours-long extended edition of Dune
I started dinner around 2000 EST last night, jasmine rice in the rice cooker, an oriental vegetable mix, and tofu in a curry sauce that turned out much more strong than I'd planned for.
Lyssa arrived from the Metro station around 2100 EST; she'd driven back with her brother and caught the Metro from his apartment building to our neighborhood. Unfortunately, she'd had dinner on the road and declined the curry. Oh, well. It's in the fridge.
Something odd is goinig on in San Deigo, California: Sonic booms that are shaking windows, cars, and everything else but no one's seen the planes doing it. The FAA doesn't have any flights in its records that would be connected with this. Even more unusual, this is happening in other places in the US, like Mississippi and Maine. Earthquakes have been ruled out, also.
The state of South Carolina is trying to make it illegal to sell sex toys. The proposed penalty for buying or selling sex toys (considered obscene) would be up to five years in jail and up to a $10kus fine. The law would allow police to seize the materials in question... do they want to hoard them all for themselves?
As if the DMCA hasn't been a big enough problem, the US government is considering amending copyright law further, in such a way that would make the DMCA look like US antitrust law in comparison. Of course, the *AA are backing it even though it's just a draft at the present time; it's called the Intellectual Property Act of 2006. The bill has stanzas which do a lot of different things, sort of like it was assembled out of a wish list of the powers that be which are afraid of the Net. For example, the bill would make it a felony to just try to violate copyright and fail, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Tools of any kind that could be used to circumvent copyright or copy protection measures ("make, import, export, obtain control of, or possess") would be made illegal. That means that Perl could be considered illegal. Trying to remove monitoring software installed on a machine could be considered illegal. Wiretapping in investigation of "copyright crimes" would be permissible. Copyright law would apply to works that weren't registered with the US Copyright Office. The penalty for copyright infringement woudl increase to 10 years in prison on the commercial scale, and on the non-commercial scale if the value is over $1kus. Oh, and let's not forget civil asset forfeiture: Anything used in copyright violation can and will be confiscated and destroyed, in the same way as belongings seized by the DEA during drug raids are.
What the hell are they trying to do??? Time to start pulling wires and calling your state representatives. Yesterday.
Want to see how your representatives voted on net.neutrality? Look here.
Around 1200 EST today Lyssa and I parted ways for our respective journeys: She was headed to the hospital to see her grandmother while I was headed back to Pittsburgh to spend time with my family. I made it back some time after 1300 EST today and visited the homestead for a couple of hours. Dataline's doing much better these days: After the fall a few weeks ago, she's walking on her own now, with neither walker nor cane to support her ankle after the damage it took. She's getting used to taking synthroid to regulate her metabolism, but she's not too pleased about having to monitor her blood sugar a few times a day. What I thought were coffee stains on her fingertips were actually deep bruises left by the lancets used to draw blood for testing.
My grandfather's doing well these days, I am glad to say. He isn't able to do much anymore, given that his vision and hearing are quite poor and now he gets out of breath readily. He's been spending his time enjoying his retirement and petting the cat, who still dotes on him like she did when she was a kitten though she studiously avoids everyone else who approaches.
My mother and I spent the afternoon catching up on everything that's been going on around the house and with the family.. I don't know if I'll be able to make the family reunion this year but the invitation's been extended. The house is looking good. I filled Dataline in on what's been happening down here with respect to this, that, and the other thing.
My bike's almost fifteen years old - the tyres are rotted out and I'm not sure if the brakes are trustworthy or not. The chain and sprockets are rusty, and would have to be either replaced or soaked in kerosene to get them clean. I doubt my abilities to reassemble them into a safely usable apparatus also. It would be easier to go shopping for a new bicycle at some point in the near future, especially because I'll be riding it to and from work with hardware strapped to my back. I hate to say it, but I've asked my family to dispose of my old bike - by giving it to Goodwill for reconstruction if possible, but to throw it out of they have to. I also picked through some more stuff in my old lab, signed off on throwing some stuff away, and packed a few more boxes into the TARDIS to take back with me tomorrow.
The prognosis is in on Lyssa's grandmother: She has a staph infection in her leg, and it's going to reach the bone sooner or later. Surgery will not be performed on her; I don't think that anyone thinks that she would survive an operation at this time, as she is too physically weak to handle the shock. If and when the infection reaches the bone, the pain will really begin and she will be put on morphine.. then it will be only a matter of time. She was in the early stages of pulmonary edema today, but a diuretic was administered and she responded positively in a very short period of time. Said one person to me, drowning in one's body fluids wasn't a very nice way to go..
Definitely something to think about when eating dinner.
My body's still not adjusted to the new environment: The rain and wind and new strains of pollen and whatnot have snarled my sinuses up but good. It's also a good bit more humid than I'm used to, and the heat's slowing me down. I feel like I should be taking a shower right now. Hell, I feel like I should be doing anything to get my mind running normally again. I feel sleepy.. my sleep schedule is messed up, as Lyssa observed a few minutes ago. Maybe I'll go to sleep soon...
Well, it's just a minute or two shy of midnight on the eastern seaboard (so I'm posting a little early, big deal) and Lyssa and I are back in Pittsburgh. Lyssa's grandmother is of venerable age: Her body's pushing ninety, she's very frail, and a cut on her leg became infected sometime in the recent past, and she's been hospitalised for treatment. I don't know if gangrene has set in, but it's definitely something that they're concerned about. They're considering surgery to treat the infected cut.. no one knows if she's going to make it, or how much longer she'll be alive.
Lyssa wanted to spend some time with her.
Earlier this week I started pulling wires and after I got off work this afternoon I headed for home and threw some stuff into a bag. We loaded up the TARDIS and set course for the state of Pennsylvania. We left around 1630 EST on Friday afternoon, and promptly got stuck in traffic on the beltway. The road warriors of DC, whose legal residences are in Pennsylvania but live five days out of every seven in Virginia, Maryland, or Washington, DC were heading for home as fast as they could, which actually worked out to be at a speed of five miles per hour. It took about ninety minutes to make it to route 270 North.
We stopped off for dinner around 1900 EST at Cracker Barrel and had a fast supper on the road as the rain rolled in and began to soak the lands south of the Mason-Dixon Line.
Travel back north was badly impeded by the fog that filled the air for much of the trip. Our speed averaged about twenty miles per hour for a couple of hours.. we finally got in around 2330 EST safe and sound.
The price of gas in DC has been rising steadily for the past week. When Lyssa and I departed, the cheapest, lowest quality gas we could find was $3us per gallon, and goes up from there. Thankfully, the TARDIS gets excellent gas mileage, so the trip home took less than a half talk of gas. Still.. it's a hit to the pocketbook.
The reason for this is because the price of crude oil hit $75us per fifty-five gallon barrel today. Thanks to a few remarks by certain individuals in the US media this week about the situation in Iran pertaining to nuclear material, the oil market is shaken up, and prices are headed in the general direction of the International Space Station. On top of that, the biggest refineries in the US are still bouncing back from the hurricanes that hit the southern coast of the United States last year, which hasn't helped the situation any.
I'm going to check out my old ten-speed when I get to my old lab and see if it can ever be repaired. If it can, I might strip it down a bit and load it into the TARDIS to take back with me.
Also going on in Pennsylvania, an empty flatbed truck carrying half a million US dollars in duffel bags was stopped by security forces at a nuclear power plant. The drivers claim stupidity. No one's claimed ownership of the confiscated fortune in small bill yet.
Let this be a lesson to you: Always, ALWAYS research the names you plan to give your children!
Somebody's been reverse engineering Ad-Aware by Lavasoft and some interesting things have been discovered.
I'm very impressed by this: Using Nintendo Gameboys to compose and play music.
It's one thing to have a loophole in your security but quite another to find one and force your staff to sign NDAs that prohibit them from ever talking about them. Wackenhut Security (yep, the cammo dudes), which is employed by the Department of Homeland Security to protect their installations had its employees do just that to keep them from talking about anything they deem sensitive, which includes a couple of major security breaches at DHS that leaked out to the media. These security breaches must have been pretty major - Wackenhut missed out on a couple of big DHS contracts as a result. Employees that didn't sign the NDAs could have been fired; this was presumably to keep them from leaking more details about the security loopholes to the media. The bugaboo here is the term "sensitive but unclassified", which is a catch-all classification for stuff that could be potentially embarassing or annoying if it got out. It can also technically be applied to anything without going through a process of analysis to determine how sensitive the data in question is. Think of it as the duct-tape-across-the-mouth of random information that people talk about at the coffee maker, and when you consider the stuff that people anywhere talk about at the coffee maker or in the bathroom.. hell, it only makes sense, at least until they get whatever it is fixed up.
Whenever they get around to fixing the security holes they found, anyway.
Happy 4/20, everyone.
Oh, and happy anniversary, Zard Biomatrix and Liz! Congratulations on four years of marriage!
The US government updated its list of Guantanamo Bay detainees, bringing the confirmed prisoner count up to 558.
How safely does your bank handle net.usage? This is by no means an exhaustive list but of the bigger ones, it'll tell you which ones do and don't have secure login facilities.
Database system giant Oracle has released a bundle of critical updates for v10i which patches thirty-six separate security vulnerabilities, some of which have been known about for almost eight hundred days. Some folks are finally releasing their exploits for these holes, but for every one that gets posted, nobody knows how many others have been privately known about and used for the same period of time..
Some of the people the FBI got in touch with about their attempts to get hold of journalist Jack Anderson's files have weighed in on the subject, and they don't have anything nice to say, even though they said it diplomatically. The Anderson family refused to allow the FBI to confiscate documents, even to "review temporarily" (which sounds a lot like "investigative confiscation"). Holes in the FBI's story and reasoning are also exposed by folks who actually knew what Anderson did (like the fact that he didn't keep "reporter's notes" wherever he went, instead keeping everything in his head until it came time to write the story). This is interesting stuff - make the time to sit down and read it today.
I need one or two of these at home.
In December of 2005, Jack Anderson, who was known as a reporter in DC that would go to great lengths to find a story, passed away. He left his files, some 200-plus document storage boxes of information that he'd collected from his contacts throughout the government over the years, to George Washington University. Anderson specialised in muckraking, digging up the information that some people wanted to keep secret and published it in his syndicated column. He pissed off a lot of people over the years with some stuff he covered, such as Watergate and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The FBI wants to go through them before anyone else can to censor information they deem is 'top secret', which very well might constitute covering the asses of some powerful people who are still in power in this country. The author of this article makes the observation that this isn't unusual for the current regeime in the US, because a concerted push to classify information that was formerly publically available has been underway since at least 2001. A number of people, including some journalism professors, were also the subjects of visits by the FBI, and they were a little shaken up by this.
Didn't they once do something like this in Russia? Keeping everything hidden.. visiting people who write things that they consider a threat.. going through documents and making them disappear.. secret B&E runs to keep tabs on what's going on (made legal by the USA PATRIOT Act)...
IBM's published some practical information for coders out there who are getting ready to port their code to 64-bit Linux. There are a few gotchas in here, so take note if you're going to upgrade.
Electronics giant Philips has patented a technology that makes it impossible to change the channel to dodge adverts. Current cable TV technology implements something called MHP (multimedia home platform), which is the messaging system that sends flagging data along with the audiovisual data that lets viewers call up summaries and schedules with their remote controls. Digital cable customers are no doubt familiar with this. Philips has put forth modifications that would make it impossible to change the channel until the ads are over.
What's next? Not being allowed to turn off the TV until the ads are over?
Holy shit. InSoc's back in business. To wit: Kurt Harland is not only married but expecting a child soon, the rest of InSoc has been jamming quite a bit since that show in New York last year, and they've got two new members, Christopher Anton (vocals) and Sonja Myers (keyboards). They've got some new material written and InSoc is considering going on tour. Judging from the comments of some folks who are music afficionados, and a few others who are in the music industry, opinions are mixed... it's way too soon to predict how InSoc version... 5.0? 6.0?.. will turn out.
Spring has come to the DC area, and the price of gas is climbing a few cents every day. Last night I stopped off to tank up at the Shell station on the highway, which tends to have the cheapest gas in the area, and discovered that they were completely out of 87 octane, which is the least expensive of all gasoline blends. That was mildly annoying.
I am now considering getting a bicycle to commute to and from work because I would initially spend a good bit of money buying the bike, but would save money on the long run because I wouldn't be buying as much petrol every week. Up to a certain point, I'd be able to ride the bike to the store to go shopping, also, which would save money.
I'm not sure how much the nuclear hullabaloo in Iran has to do with it, but the oil companies love reasons to crank up the price of gas (and conveniently forget to lower it back to what it used to be)... even though the US gets most of its crude oil from South America and not the Middle East. Crude oil is, around this time, going for about $72.20us per 55-gallon barrel, and it continues to climb.
We are definitely not driving to HOPE this year. Or SalonCon.
Tom Cruise is at it again - he's announced that he's going to eat his child's placenta after his wife gives birth. I wonder if he realises that usually it's the mother that does this for nutritional reasons...
Geez... how many people think that photographing public property or things on display is illegal, anyway?? It isn't as if, oh, someone walking down the sidewalk can't remember where a friggin' window is or anything.
The Billboard Liberation Front struck again in San Francisco, California.
Interesting. In running a whois on an IP address, I found the following comments in the domain registration records:
Comment: For Abuse Issues, email abuse@bellsouth.net. NO ATTACHMENTS. Include IP Comment: address, time/date, message header, and attack logs. Comment: For Subpoena Request, email ipoperations@bellsouth.net with "SUBPOEN A" in Comment: the subject line. Law Enforcement Agencies ONLY, please.
US tax laws change every year, and sometimes from month to month depending on what direction the wind's blowing in downtown DC. This, however, should make you sit up and take notice: The IRS is making it leagal for people who prepare taxes and keep books to sell sensitive information to information brokers and marketing firms. If identity theft wasn't a problem before, it sure as hell will be when that happens... the way it's being written, whomever prepares the tax forms would have to obtain written permission to release the data, but who reads each and every line of their paperwork? Thankfully a couple of senators are already making a stink over it, rightly stating that once the data's been sold, it could then be resold to people who don't keep it safe.
The state of Ohio is not only considering makeing abortion illegal, but it wants to make it a felony for women to go to a different state to have an abortion. Ohio House bill #228, the brainchild of Tim Brinkman, will also make it illegal to help a woman arrange an abortion, and any who do so will be charged as well. The bill hasn't been voted on yet, but it is definitely one to keep an eye on.
Speaking of things to keep an eye on, I've been watching stuff like this unfold for a while, though I'm not in a position to do anything, really, about it. That's the problem with lurking...
I read a couple of Usenet newsgroups, among the the alt.gothic.* hierarchy. One of the frequent posters in there is a woman named Gia, who cultivated friendships with other posters through Usenet postings and presumably e-mail and other communication methods. A few weeks ago, someone stalked her and took her out. When last I heard she was still in the hospital and not likely to go out in public anytime soon.
Convergence is the yearly net.goth convention and festival held in North America, as background.
At Convergence XII, held in New Orleans, Louisiana last weekend, a woman was jumped and badly injured by a man named Will Hunt, who was apparently known to the woman. She was not only thrown to the ground but she was stomped on. Her facial injuries are extensive.
A few pictures were posted to the Net, which I will link to here.
I will only say this: They look familiar.
Information on one William Hamlet Hunt can be found here, here, and word's getting around in this post.
Anyone have any information? Anyone know this guy? Call the New Orleans Police Department and fill 'em in.
Happy day-after-Easter, everyone. I hope that you didn't have too much candy yesterday, and that your kids' sugar buzzes didn't drive you off the deep end.
Oh, and happy Black Monday 2006, residents of the United States of America. Did you get your tax forms done?
Net.law in China has changed, and not for the better. A new law was passed there that makes it illegal to run an e-mail server that hasn't been registered with the Chinese government. Given how they're trying to crack down on net.communication of all kinds in China, I seriously doubt that it's to prevent proliferation of spam. The law also makes it illegal to discuss electronic security matters via e-mail.. one would think that this was to stop crackers from conversing, but when did a few laws ever stop that? About the only thing that would do is make it difficult for legitimate security research to get done. The Net's already got enough security problems.
I guess it really is true: On the Net, you really can find a community dedicated to the strangest things. Like fanfics about McDonalds breakfast food. (safe for work)
A fire suppression system test in an airplane hanger at Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota went horribly wrong, filling the entire hangar to a depth equivelent to two stories with fire retardant foam. The foam then began to spill out of the building onto the tarmac.
Strong crypto will be a part of the anti-copy protection scheme the MPAA, RIAA, and other media organisations will require all home entertainment hardware manufacturers to implement soon... the idea behind this is that you won't be able to jump a computer with a video capture card or a VCR in between your cable box and TV anymore so that you can't make a recording of whatever it is that you're watching. Well, that crypto isn't so strong after all - a guy named Ed Felton figured out how to guess the secret vector (sort of like a private key) used to encrypt and decrypt media traffic passing between devices. If you know the structure of the secret vector you can figure out the key intercept the traffic, and decode the data streams.
It's known that the NYPD has been photographing public demonstrators since 2003, but when anyone starts taking pictures of them, either deliberately or accidentally, they definitely do not think that turnabout is fair play.
The US government is kicking around some scary ideas if you're trying to keep some semblance of privacy on the Net: Forcing ISPs to record everything you do on the Net on the off chance that you're up to something they don't like so that they can track you down. A few states, Colorado among them, are considering laws like this at the state level. These records would include WWeb browsing, IM, FTP, probably Usenet and e-mail... if you have something to say but want to publish anonymously for some reasion, you'd be SOL because they'd know what websites you went to to do your research, what blogging service you connected to... sorry, Publius, but you'd be screwed. They got the idea from the European Union, which voted to enact this abck in December of 2005, and in the highly paraniod political climate of today, it was only a matter of time. Of course, they're bringing out the usual arguments about child pornography that no one would ever, ever speak out against.. sort of like wrapping yourself in the flag to keep from being burned at the stake. Such laws, to be fair, would also make investigation of crimes that took place some time ago but before the statues of limitation would expire. That's an incredible amount of data to store on a monthly basis. A bill in Colorado could put a few ISPs out of business if they don't comply because fines would be levied per incident.
Happy Easter, everyone.
Okay.. Lyssa and I have just finished watching episode one of season two (or twenty-eight, depending on how you're counting) of Doctor Who, entitled New Earth.
David Tenant rocks all known sheep. I think he's as good in the role of the Doctor as Christopher Eccleston was. Second.. furries are going to go nuts over the nuns. You'll see what I mean. Third... I haven't laughed so hard as I did in ages. David Tenant and Billie Piper play off of one another very well, and the physical comedic gags were excellent. It's a howl.
And the ending's a tear-jerker.
Grant, Lyssa's brother, came over for dinner tonight. Lyssa put together yet another magnificent meal, consisting of a roast pork tenderloin, couscous, roasted potatoes, stir-fried vegetables, and cherry pie for dessert. We took some time out of our busy schedules (Grant's homework for his masters' degree, Lyssa and I screwing around all day, modulo some cleaning) to rest, relax, and eat a filling meal. Grant was nice enough to give us his old television (replaced with a large plasma screen display) to replace the twenty-seven inch television that I brought with me from Pennsylvania that had a bad tuner circuit (see here for more details). We brought it with us from our trip to Grant's place last night but I'd left it in the car because of its weight and awkward size. Tonight, after some fumbling behind the entertainment centre and cursing at the coax cable fittings, we pulled the old one out and hauled the new one out of the back of my car after I'd pulled it around. We had to take some sharp knives to the back of the entertainment centre to enlarge the opening (because the new TV's back end doesn't taper the way the old one's did) but after some finangling we got it put in place and powered up. I spent a few minutes programming the universal remote control for it but it's up and running.
We had an unexpected guest for Easter dinner tonight, we discovered just a half-hour or so ago. After Grant left for home Lyssa and I were in our usual positions in the office when I caught a flash of something small and dark scurrying about on the floor out of the corner of my eye. A subprocess in the left hemisphere of my brain ran a quick diagnostic on my visual cortex: Yep, it checked out as expected. A few seconds later, I caught it again more directly and and the good ol' pattern matcher pegged it:
Mouse.
Somehow a mouse got into the apartment.
This wasn't one of the cute mice that Helen raises as pets/for snake food, nor was it a cute little brown and white field mouse. This was a slate grey and lighter grey mouse with black eyes and tiny pink little paws. This was a ninja mouse running around in the office, climbing over cables and possibly with designs of chewing on them (some of those cables carry 120VAC, which isn't healthy for any organic lifeforms). More's the point, the diminutive ninja mouse ran across the floor a couple of times. Lyssa's chair has rollers on the legs... I'll let you do the math on that one.
The little guy was running around the baseboard, as mice are wont to do, but we'd narrowly missed him. As Lyssa went to get a colandar (which seems to be standard equipment for capturing rodents on the loose) I kept an eye on the mouse... who ran into the open closet and was running around the crates storing electronic equipment.
That made it personal.
Lyssa and I managed to trap the mouse under the colandar and slide an opened out folder under it to pin him in place, with the eventual goal being to leave him outside and have no harm come to him, at least from either of us. Unfortunately that went a little south as the mouse made a break for freedom by trying to squeeze through a quarter inch gap that briefly appeared between the rim of the colandar and the folder. Of course, I tried to stop the escape by pressing down gently on the colandar, which should have provoked the mouse to back up into captivity and out of distress.
Fat chance. He wasn't going to go anywhere unless it was straight ahead.
Rather than hurt the mouse we let him go and took a few minutes to regroup. I lost track of where he'd gotten off to, though he didn't run for safety as we had thought. Instead rodentus escapus parked itself behind a tennis ball that had fallen on the floor and sat there. Mice are excitable creatures, and at times like this they'll often drop over of a heart attack. This one, while winded and shaken thankfully didn't flatline on us. Lyssa found a shoebox and after moving some stuff around and placing a baffle or two to limit our intruder's options, we got him trapped inside the shoebox, right side up, with the lid securely fashioned.
We took shinobi-gesshirui outside and let him go by the dumpsters. He sat in the bottom of the shoebox for a minute or two but once Lyssa tipped it over he cautiously stepped out and sat in the grass for a few moments, probably to get his bearings.
What bothers me, however, is how the mouse got in. When I was crawling around on the floor I didn't see any mouse droppings, mouse holes, or telltale wood shavings that mean that the mouse had chewed its way into the building. It's possible that it came in from the balcony, but that begs the question "Can a mouse climb fifteen feet straight up?" It also may have gotten in through the front door while it was open today but it's just as likely that the mouse would have been spotted much earlier. Maybe there are some hidden mouse holes around the apartment. I'll have to take a torch and look around tomorrow.
Wait a minute... Ninjalicious died of cancer?!?
So... the Ladytron show last night at the 9:30 Club in northwestern DC..
Rocked. The. House.
Lyssa napped for an hour or two after work last night because she was completely exhausted after the day she'd had while I had a spot of dinner and relaxed for a while. Eventually we got moving and headed out so that Lyssa could track down a gift for her brother's birthday (which didn't quite happen - for once, Best Buy doesn't have what someone is looking for (nevermind the price)), get a bite to eat (in hindsight, I sort of regret that sandwich but I don't think my blood sugar would have held out all night), and find our way to the 9:30 Club.
The 9:30 Club is in northwestern DC. Here is a photograph of it from a keyhole satellite. You know where this is going.
Lyssa and I, in search of a single concert or nightclub, have probably seen every shady place in DC where you probably shouldn't go after dark. Last night was no exception. We wound up asking for directions around 2300 EST in a part of town that made the hair on the forearms stand up. Thankfully I managed to find a police officer familiar with the area we were stuck in and the DC metropolitan area who tried his hardest to get us back to I-395.. that didn't work too well, either, though.
Somehow, and neither Lyssa nor I are quite sure how it happened, we managed to make it all the way through the DC core in a straight shot.. and wound up in Tacoma Park, Maryland.
If you asked me to repeat this maneuver, I probably couldn't do it.
We managed to find the club around 2345 EST, whereupon we paid the guy who runs the parking lot across the street, picked up our tickets, and headed in. The 9:30 was SRO, and we walked in during the very last song of the opening act, called the Venus Kick. I didn't really hear their music so I can't say one way or the other how good they are. Your call.
We didn't really have to wait very long for Ladytron to get set up on stage. We also didn't have to wait very long before I popped a geekbone, either. Korgs as far as the eye could see. Korg analog synthesizers, dripping with patch cables, dials, knobs, and quarter-inch jumpers...
My fingers are twitching just thinking about it.
Six Korg synths, a drum kit, and a couple of guitars. Doesn't sound like much, does it?
Ladytron took the stage with an extra member, a female bass player who took over rhythm keyboards for the second encore song. Helen has taken over most of the singing, at least on tour, from Mira Aroyo, and did an excellent job doing so last night. I'm used to hearing her singing backup on the albums so it was a good change of pace. I am also used to hearing her using her voice as an instrument (she uses some operatic techniques to sing syllables) than to sing actual words (in any of the languages that they write their sometimes non sequitur lyrics in). I never did get used to it, though it was enjoyable to hear it live.
Ladytron played quite a few songs off of The Witching Hour
When the opening strains of Play Girl started, a tallish kid went nuts and plowed through the crowd at top speed, nearly knocking me flat on my face and probably injuring a few of the girls standing in front of Lyssa and I. Ultimately, I let it go. There's no sense in spoiling an awesome concert by acting like a dick.
The music last night at the concert was much lower in pitch than I'm accustomed to hearing from Ladytron. I'm not sure how far down the scale they transposed everything - a lot of their synthesized sounds are modulated noise, to be frank, and when you've got that many frequences run through distortion modules and mixed together into a single instrument/channel.. hell, I couldn't tell, and I'm usually pretty good about figuring out pitch and key. Ladytron's songs are closer to soundscapes than they are songs as most people think of them, or at least that's my informed opinion. It might just be another quirk of my admittedly nonstandard central nervous system, but Ladytron's music has a strong visual component for me: I 'see' soundscapes in a synesthetic way, and their music invokes images of cities intermixed with what I can best describe as bomb craters, overgrown Amazon forests, buildings that move around like gargantuan vehicles, and hordes of people milling through the streets. I don't need drugs to trip, just buy me a new compact disk.
Anyway, their music's taken on a much darker quality, and it's reflected in those synaesthetic visions. It's still very pretty.
The sound pressure coming out of their PA system was immense. Lyssa and I were standing around the ninth or tenth row back from the stage, and I felt it as strongly as I did right next to the stage during the Sisters show a few weeks back. Lyssa, who normally never wears hearing protection of any kind at clubs or shows (cough cough), complained for the first time ever that the sound was far too loud. Loud enough to cause pain for a time after the concert was over, in fact.
Ladytron came out for two encores after the show was over, once after the urging of the crowd, the second time to enjoy themselves (they did Another Breakfast With You) because, as Helen said to us, the last time they played DC it snowed and almost nobody made it to the show, so they put everything they had into it. Mira and Helen sang it as a duet, which I found surprising and enjoyed greatly.
Mira's got this evil-looking slitted eyes glare going on when she's on stage. Add the elf-locks in and she looks downright evil.
No pictures from this show. I still haven't uploaded the pictures from the last concert I took my phone to because it's damned expensive to do so anymore. Damn you, Toshiba, for making it so hard to get a data cable for my cellcam.
It was much easier to return home from the show because we got on Georgia Avenue and just followed it until we reached the beltway, at which time we were home free. We stopped off briefly to get large bottles of water to rehydrate after the concert was over and got back around 0200 EST today. Lyssa stayed up for a while but I had to get to bed to collapse. I'd been up since 0600 EST yesterday due to network maintenance and badly needed the sleep.
Excellent show.
As always I picked up some new threads while I was there, in the form of two Ladytron shirts. Due to the price of parking for the show ($15us) I didn't have enough cash on me to pick up the collection of pins to add to my war jacket. Oh, well.
I'm not much of a photography buff, but these images are impressive. They were all composed using a technique called HDR (high dynamic range), and are done by taking multiple photographs of the same thing under multiple conditions, such as different times of day, different sets of lights, what have you. When you finally develop the film or composite the images together, you get an incredible amount of detail from the image. Check out the examples in the article to see what I mean.
I am now convinced that whomever invented the pager is going to burn in a very special hell.. oh, yes. There is a district in Hades set aside specifically for this individual, which he or she will share along with a myriad of child molestors and the inventors of the IVR. Still, even though I kept getting bounced awake this morning by said piece of hardware, I still feel pretty good about life in general and my chassis in particular. Looking back over things, I think it's because it's been a little dehydrated over the past few days, and the extra water last night did a lot to clear my head. I actually feel relatively awake today. Then again, the fact that it's a Friday might also have something to do with it.
Okay.. on the fanboy front, the movie Final Fantasy 7: Advent Children
Also, tomorrow, 15 April 2006, the second season of Doctor Who will begin airing on BBC-1. On 16 April 2006, it will once again be time to start haunting BitTorrent trackers across the Net to download the episodes. The first episode of season 28/season 2 will air at 1900 GMT in England, so that would be 0000 EST 16 April 2006... figure two or three hours to encode, build a .torrent file, and get it listed on the trackers.. so start searching the trackers around 1000 EST on 16 April and there will be a good chance that it'll be up. You can watch the trailer for this season here.
Posting someone's picture on MySpace is identity theft? This reminds me a lot of the overreaction of one of my comp.sci professors at IUP (whose website was taken down at some point) at having his face Photoshopped onto an astronaut's body back in 1998.
Gary McKinnon, the cracker in and out of the news since 2005 for cracking many US military systems in search of data related to UFOs is starting to sweat like a blacksmith as his worst fears may be realised: He might wind up in Guantanamo Bay for specialising in military networks. He's already facing extradition and a military tribunal; this isn't just icing on the cake.
Neat! Make your own ferrofluid!
One Mark Klein, formerly of AT&T, came forward about the NSA's domestic wiretapping programme.. he was there when AT&T built a monitoring centre for the NSA. The EFF filed a class-action lawsuit over this recently and Klein stepped forward to blow his whistle over it. In January of 2003 AT&T constructed a monitoring centre next to their switching centre in San Francisco, California which handles long-distance and international calls. Regular technicians cleared for access to that area were forbidden access while the extra room was being outfitted. Klein was one of the folks who set up jumpers between the telephone switches and the restricted room which lead to some pretty sophisticated network analysis and monitoring gear, including a Naurus STA 6400, which is said to be capable of watching network links running at speeds approaching of 10 gigabits per second.. that's an OC-192 link, which is an amazing amount of data carrying capacity. Check out this page, which lists the major network links and their speeds for more information. To give you an idea of how much data this is, a T-1 line can carry 23 calls at a time. A T-3 line (one step up) can handle 644 calls simultaneously. An OC-192 network link, which the Naurus STA 6400 can comfortably monitor, can carry up to 147,200 regular voice calls simultaneously.
I should elucidate a bit.. the STA 644 can monitor OSI layer four traffic (networking protocols, like TCP and UDP) at OC-192 speeds. If set to monitor links at OSI layer seven (the application layer, at which you'll find protocols like HTTP, FTP, SMTP, RTP, and SIP), it can run at OC-48 speeds (2.5 gigabits per second, or about 36,800 telephone conversations).
This is one hell of a powerful box, to be able to keep up with all of that.
Still tired. Still feeling out of sorts. Still wondering where most of my energy is going. I feel like I haven't slept in days yet I've been getting about seven hours of sleep every night. I don't understand what's happening.
Got to see Rialian, Helen, and Kash last night. Schedules finally coincided and a few of us got together to hang around in Rockville. Hummingwolf came out, also, as well as Laurelinde and Branwyn, and Redlynx, someone that I don't think any of us have met before. It wasn't a big night, just a bunch of folks sitting around talking and trying to figure stuff out.
I crashed pretty hard last night; in fact, it was early, for a change, but I still feel like I'm running a couple of quarts low.
I haven't really had it together enough to write much of substance, either. Every time I try, either something happens or I lose what was on my mind.
Folks following the MPAA and the broadcast flag debate will find this development notable: Kevin Murphy, aide to Senator Gordon Smith, who happens to be one of senators that are pushing the hardest for the broadcast flag bill, just took a job with Viacom, one of the corporations that is pushing for the broadcast flag. Legal folks in DC are beginning to cry foul because it smells too much like a bribe (do what we want and we'll hire you for a buttload of money) or a behind the scenes deal.
Site security of US military bases abroad isn't as good as it should be, because stolen USB keydrives containing sensitive, classified, and secret information are showing up on the black market not too far away from the base in Kabul. And by secret information, I mean lists of targets and data pertaining to defenses erected by US forces. A reporter working for the AP in the area decided to find out for him/herself, and was surprised that the allegations were, in fact true.
I feel ever so much safer....
Okay.. how about something a bit more cheerful. On the biotech front, Dr. Gary Gorbsky, Ph.D of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation has figured out how to not only stop human cells from dividing, but if they're caught at the right time during the process replication can even be reversed. That's right.. he figured out how to halt the division of cells partway through the process. The implications for cancer treatment should be obvious.. his work will be published in the journal Nature in the 13 April 2006 issue.
Folks interested in creative accounting should take note: In the state of California the Internal Revenue Service now has permission to get information on PayPal's customers' money transfer records because it's possible to transfer money out of the country. PayPal, at this time, is considering its options. Probably since PayPal went live, people have been using the service to transfer money to accounts in other countries where the laws are such that the money can't be taxed by US authorities.
Speaking of taxation, a couple of states, including New York and California have issued ultimatums to citizens that they have to pay use tax on net.commerce or else they face audits (which are not too different from being fisted by a jackhammer) and possibly fines. Their deadline is 17 April 2006, the same day as tax day. No one knows how much money in taxes aren't being paid by net.users; probably enough that the powers that be are getting tired of not getting paid. Not a few folks think that that figures state governments are quoting are bunk.
It's 0905 EST, and I feel like someone's been hitting me repeatedly in the temple with a roll of quarters. Yesterday was one of the most frustrating and painful days that I've had in many a month, and by the end of the day I was holding on through willpower alone. Lyssa had booked us to go to a corporate dinner held by IBM, which is backing the project she's working on right now, so we got dressed up and hit the road after I got the last of work packed away yesterday evening. Much to my surprise, I knew where the dinner was being held: Mortons: The Steakhouse, which happens to be just a few minutes away from where I work, much to my surprise. Morton's is easily one of the most swanky restaurants in NOVA - you've got your mahogany wood panelling on the walls, you've got your dim lighting and private booths for everyone, you've got your open kitchens where you can watch dinner being prepared for you, you've got your wine buckets and an excellent selection thereof from the cellar, and you've got your menus with such dishes as "shrimp alexander in white wine and butter sauce" with nary a price to be found.
You can drop $150us on a dinner for two there, easily. If you've got the cash to spare, you're buying an experience right out of a James Bond movie, and it's worth every penny.
I spent the evening hobnobbing with the other IBM folks and meeting the people that Lyssa's been talking about for so long. Interesting folks. I've never seen so many blue button-down shirts with the collars open in one place, before.
We finally got home around 2200 EST, and after taking a shower I went to bed early because I was utterly wiped out. I woke up this morning around my usual time and felt like hell for no good reason. I still feel like someone's taking up more RAM than usual in my brain and it's paging like mad as a result.
...is anything going to happen on 17 May?
David Holmes, a psychology lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, has devised the equation (S + C) * ((B + F) / T), which defines what the perfect ass looks like. That's right, the shape of the human ass has been reduced to a mathematical algorithm. S is the overall shape of the butt; C is how spherical the buttocks as a whole are; B represents the wobbling of the muscles and the bounce under normal conditions; F is the firmness of the ass in question; V is the symmetry of the butt, expressed as a ratio of hip-to-waist size; T stands for both cellulite density and skin texture. The reason I'm posting the equation is because I'm pretty sure that at least one modelling agency is going to pick up on this and either patent it or buy it outright for use when recruiting new models.
Anyone who's ever seen the movie Real Genius will sit up and take notice of this news coming out of the defense industry: They're working on practical, airborne laser weapons for military deployment. The US Air Force is looking at a full-scale test of an anti-ballistic missile laser weapon mounted in a jumbo jet. They're also getting ready to go into beta testing with land-based millimeter-wave microwave emitters for antipersonnel purposes. Colletively, they're referred to as directed energy weapons. Interestingly, a project referred to as "Zeus" is a solid-state (as opposed to gas excitation) laser that they've been testing to clear minefields, and another called THEL (Tactical High Energy Laser) that they've reportedly used to take out missiles (used in the tests) in flight from the ground.
Some interesting information on the monitoring system the NSA is using to monitor domestic telephone calls.
Okay, let me get this straight.. some people want to rice out their hermit crabs' shells?!
The Whitehouse had an unexpected guest this weekend, in the form of one Brian Lee Patterson, who has a history of scaling the fence surrounding the White House. The article has some interesting information pertaining to the security details at the White House: A dozen Secret Service agents, a K9 unit.. I wonder what the snipers on the roof thought of this.
Friday night after work, I dragged myself home after a long afternoon of worry and crisis at work. It never fails: On a Friday afternoon anything that can possibly crash, fail, catch on fire, blow up, or go berserk and start killing innocent bystanders will do so with a appropriately high level of drama. After the week I'd had I was running on empty, and all but sank into a coma after I got home. Seeing as how Lyssa and I had to go out to get stuff to make dinner, it wasn't an easy thing. We returned the DVDs that we'd rented the week before (even though we'd watched only a few of them) and then headed to the store to pick up a couple of things.
I don't remember much of anything about Friday night up until 2130 EST or so because I was asleep on my feet just about the whole time. I woke up after dinner was ready in bed, having curled up to rest.
The rest of the night was kind of hazy.. I wasn't all there, and definitely wasn't running on all 128 bits in my registers.
Saturday morning I got up early so that I could drop the TARDIS off at the dealership for the 11.5k mile maintenance, which it was long overdue for. I took off to make a quick stop at the supermarket for a couple of things and then headed out to the highway for maintenance. In hindsight, I really should have taken a book with me because I was stuck there for over an hour because the courtesy shuttle back home was late in coming. I entertained myself for a while with cups of bad coffee and the Washington Post, and later messing around with a customer service kiosk in the lounge (I tried to jackpot it but didn't find anything out of the ordinary or even vaguely interesting in the software, and gave up after a while). Once that was said and done, I turned to cellphone video games to kill time, whereupon I discovered that my copy of Double Dragon (one of my favourite games of all time) had expired.
Expired! What kind of video game spontaneously disables itself after ninety days, even after you've paid for the full version? What a racket...
Thankfully, my trusty copy of Tetris still works, and got me through until the shuttle-van arrived and dropped me off at home.
Saturday was cold, wet, windy, and rainy... not much fun, in other words. Lyssa cleaned up some of the apartment while I was out, and after I got home I took over some of the work, such as sweeping up the kitchen to mop and running the vacuum cleaner through the apartment. The latter came to a screeching halt when I realised that the vacuum wasn't actually doing anything... nothing was getting picked up, and it was only generating large wads of hair sitting on the carpet. I pulled the plug on the sweeper and flipped it over to diagnose the problem and discovered that the rotating brush was so covered in hair that you couldn't see the bristles anymore. I pulled out my pocket knife and began to dismantle the vacuum so that I could clean it out... and soon discovered that un-bundling the brush wouldn't do any good because the business part, the part of the sweeper that leads from the brush up into the bag by way of a fan was plugged with a six-inch mass of hair, lint, and dust. It took the better part of an hour, working with fingers, pliers, and later haemostats to pull every last bit of junk out of the hosepipe.
After reassembly and repowering, I rediscovered that the suck fromm the sweeper is incredible - not only did it accidentally suck up a stuffed mouse cat toy but I could barely move the sweeper because it was clinging so tightly to the floor. At least the carpet's clean again.
Kash and Solo arrived early in the afternoon. They'd been at the National Cherry Blossom Festival on Saturday, but they'd been caught in the rain and wind and were freezing; the kettle was put on and clothes were changed. They'd picked up a couple of things while they were there, like loads of Pocky and a few t-shirts. The anime exhibit there was, to quote solo, "Skeevy," so I'm not too heartbroken about not making it this year. I trust his opinion.
Anyway, we hung out at the apartment all afternoon and relaxed. Lyssa, Kash, and I were playing video games in our respective spaces; Solo read some of the books he'd picked up at the fair. Late in the afternoon we ordered pizza for dinner; Lyssa made some tasty curried tofu for Kash while we waited for Pizza Hut to deliver the pizzas. Later in the evening we decamped to Borders to find coffee and hang out for a while.. we split up again and wandered around the store. I picked up the latest Ladytron album, which much to my surprise isn't much of an album at all, it's a compilation of songs that just happens to have a Ladytron track or two on it. What it's doing labelled as a band release I have no idea. I'll finish listening to it today and give a more thorough analysis of it, but so far it's not Ladytron, though what I have heard so far has been catchy.
Anyway, we returned home and vegged out some more.. I crashed around 0130 EST on Sunday morning, Lyssa crashed a bit earlier than I.
On Sunday morning Kash and Solo went foraging for breakfast while Lyssa and I took it easy. We eventually met back to to do not much of anything, but because it was such a nice day we went roaming around to see what kind of trouble we could get into. We wound up at the Game Parlor again to wander around.. we didn't buy too much because there wasn't much that we really needed for anything but I did pick up an art book done by Voltaire, who is known in the goth scene for his sense of humour, highly theatrical performances, and loves of stop-motion animation and sketching. It's cute. It's amusing, too.
After leaving the Game Parlor we went out in search of pants.. yes, pants. Kash, Solo, and I were in dire need of an extra pair of pants (through no design of our own, we just needed to get some gear) and went nosing around for pants that would fit. Kash opted for work khakis; I went for stonewashed bluejeans (yes, I now have clothing that isn't black - shock! gasp!); Solo, as far as I know, didn't actually find what he was looking for.
We headed home for a few minutes to dig up directions to Famous Dave's BBQ, which is supposed to be an excellent BBQ restaurant in northern Virginia.
Of course, it wasn't simple finding the damn place. We drove around for a good 45 minutes because Mapquest's directions took us in a big loop around the restaurant and down a side street that didn't keep its name if you kept going straight but would if you stopped at the light and made a hard right.
Pittsburgh and NOVA aren't all that different in that respect.
Once we got to Famous Dave's and were seated we skimmed the menu, which isn't actually all that big, just a single sheet of laminated paperboard, double-sided. If you like BBQ you'll find it here: Salmon, pork, chicken, steak, it's all there. If you're looking for something more their pickings are a good bit more slim. Appetizers are similiarly few in number on the menu, though the fried hot pickles are pretty tasty. I opted for the BBQ chicken platter for dinner and split the appetizers with everyone.
Famous Dave's keeps a sixpack of sauces on each table, from ketchup ("Bryce sauce") to their hottest, called Devil's Spit.
Devil's Spit my motorcycle boots. Their 'famous' sauces are weaker than the
stuff you can get at your local supermarket. They add a bit of flavour but they
aren't anywhere near what you'd expect from the style of cuisine, hype, and
marketing screed names. The fried pickle slices are hotter
than their hot sauces.
Famous Dave's: Two and a half flareguns, one misfired cartridge. The sauces are so weak that Solo and I almost did shots of them at the table. If you're a hardcore BBQ fan, go there. If not, it would be worth your time to look a bit more for dinner.
After dinner we headed back to the apartment to let our food digest. I did some research on new components to upgrade Leandra, who's been complaining for a few weeks now that her hardware is too slow. After the last time I worked from home, I can't put it off anymore: She needs to be reworked in a bad way.
The House Judiciary Committee was presented with a case about the US NSA's dom