What Planet Are You From?
this quiz was made by The Autist Formerly Known As Tim
It's about time someone did something like this.
I've found the setlist from the Sisters show back in March (transcribed from a photograph):
Let me see.. I've not been writing a great deal these past couple of days due to work-related stuff. I'm still working from home, pending the last couple of pieces of paperwork that have to be filled out, and working on a couple of things that, to be frank, I've never done before. As they say, this is a learning experience.. I don't know what it's going to take, but where there's a will there is most definitely a way.
Lyssa's been under the weather for the past couple of days. Apparently she's caught the Office Crud, which has laid her up since Sunday evening. She's been working from home as well this week, though under considerably poorer circumstances than I. I've run to the local CVS a couple of times this week to get stuff for her (and ran into a few snags with her prescription on Sunday, but that's a story for another time) to get medicine for her (because we were down to the last couple of boxes of, well, everything). Given that most of the medicines that have been helping have ephidrine in them, and Virginia's anti-methamphetamine law requires that purchasers of over-the-counter drugs not only be carded, but have to sign for whatever it is that they buy (and are limited to no more than 3.6 grams of ephedrine per day, which is about three 10-capsule boxes of Claritin-D), sometimes there can be a wait at the checkout counter.. a very long wait.
But I'm rambling, now.
I discovered the hard way that the CD player in my car doesn't work anymore, though the FM reciever still functions so I've been making do with an FM transmitter and my iPod (both of which I'll be taking to HOPE with me - listen to Free Radio Virtual Adepts on 101.7 FM, broadcasting with barely enough wattage to be heard 30 feet away). I wonder if the stereo in the TARDIS is covered by warranty....
Unfortunately, taking a can of compressed air to the CD insertion slot worked for all of sixty seconds, so I'll have to take it back to the shop. Damn.
I'm taking a break from reading like a fiend for the past couple of days to relax and do some writing for various projects and in various places. I'm also taking a break from (my very infrequent playing) of video games to do some writing and not just moving sprites around on the TV to level up this, that, or the other thing.
I'm surprise that Squaresoft doesn't make you level armour and weapons as well as the characters and materia.
Let's see.. what else has been afoot...
The HOPE conference, which I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, starts on Friday and runs until Sunday night. A group of us are making the bi-yearly pilgrimage to New York to attend. I need to make my list of events that I'd like to hit. Also planning to hit the dealer's room at least twice, per usual. There are a couple of folks I'd like to buttonhole for various reasons (among them Phiber Optik, who's set up a private blue boxable telephony switch for people to play around with at the con).
Aside from plans to hit The Batcave on Saturday night to get my grove on, I don't really have much in the way of set plans for HOPE, and that's exactly how I like it. Not a pathological lack of planning, mind you, but there's so much to do and so many things happen at the spur of the moment, I like to keep my options open.
Note to self: Get around to listening to those recordings of seminars from HOPEs past. Some year.
Want to see what the air quality of downtown DC is like? Look at this webcam. (note: safe for work).
One Joseph Colon must have Someone watching out for him - while working as a consultant for the FBI he snaffled the password of Director Robert Muller but won't have to do any time. He's been sentenced to a fine of $20kus.
Yay, shoulder surfing.
Hmm.. Fern just got over the Office Crud, the Lost Boys are on the shelf.. I'm glad I've been taking that tincture of echinacea that Hasufin gave me.
This is a good sign.. Jim Butcher, author of the series of novels called the Dresden Files is actually happy with what they've done to the stories and characters in the translation to a television series.
Uh-oh.. what's the cDc up to this time?
I've been asked to send a message to everyone: Snow White sends her love, everyone, and remembers that time in Pittsburgh fondly.
So, a couple of days ago, I bought a bathroom scale.
Since I moved down to DC, my body's been altering itself in subtle ways, and driving me crazy all the while. I've pontificated about this in the recent past, so I won't bore you with it again. Anyway, I bought said scale as part of a bid to lose some weight so that I could fit into more of my older clothes, including work clothes, and also to become more comfortable in my own body again.
As it stands, oddly enough, my body weight is right where it's supposed to be. After almost ten years of, to put not too fine a point on it, being twenty pounds underweight, my body's finally back where it's supposed to be, genetically speaking. I'm around 168 pounds now, which is well within the statistical norms for someone with my particular frame. I have a lot more energy and endurance now, to be sure.
Now it's mostly a matter of retraining myself in using this body.
Okay, my text is now fragmenting, so it's time for bed.
The setlist from the Iris show on 4 July is now available:
Another HOPE announcement: The FCC has granted a temporary callsign for the special event radio station at the con, designated N6H. There will be a ham radio station up on the 18th floor transmitting for the duration of the event. Reliable sources (read: the folks who are organising the radio shack at the con) have stated that they will be working 30 KHz up from the bottom of the General Class parts of the 10, 20, 40, and 80m bands. H2k6 commemorative QSL cards will be sent to anyone in the world who manages to establish radio contact with the con.
And yes, pesuant to part 97 of the FCC regs, if you're not a licensed ham operator but there is one present at the rig, you can get on the air as long as they're there.
Hee hee hee... (note: work safe - I love the title)
 | You scored as Traveler. You are a Traveler Empath, you come from a time & place far removed from here. You are an innocent, in search of your own kin and have a difficult time understanding this world. You are lost & only want to find your way back home. You bring unique gifts to this world and share them with a loving heart. Although very misunderstood, you are also very forgiving. (from the "Book of Storms" by Jad Alexander at MySilentEcho.com)
What Kind of Empath Are You? created with QuizFarm.com |
Yeah, yeah.. I've been working all day. Indulge me.
This explains one hell of a lot.
A good friend of mine is looking to sell two pre-reg tickets to the HOPE 2006 conference in New York City this weekend coming up. He's looking to sell them for the price he paid for pre-registration, $60us each. If you're interested, please e-mail me at drwho (dash) h2k6 (at) virtadpt (dot) net and we'll work something out.
Some pretty odd stuff is on the list of at-risk sites around the country that the DHS has allocated security funds to, like the Mule Day Parade in Columbia, Tennessee, Nix's Cheque Cashing (location unknown), and the Apple and Pork Festival of Clinton, Illinois. In fact, the state of Montana, which has the smallest population in the country has the most tactial assets (I don't know what else to call them - 'possible targets'?), with requisite security funding. On the other hand, the various bank headquarters in New York and California and some nuclear power plants aren't anywhere on the list.
A number of things could account for this: A test data set left in the database, giving people access to the database who aren't actually responsible for putting data into it ("Here, rate yourself on terrorist risks"), someone or someones scamming the money out of the DHS... maybe something I haven't thought of, maybe a combination of things.
"Arrests in the aspirational phase."
Wow.. all it would take is one joke in poor taste to make one a thought criminal.
Somebody tell me not to bid on this....
The deaths of J. Clifford Baxter and Ken Lay, who were behind the Enron debacle, appear to not be isolated incidents. Neil Coulbeck former employee of the Royal Bank of Scotland was found dead in London after being questioned by the US FBI as a possible witness, so there's our three-for-three.
A couple of folks are organising a PGP key signing party at HOPE 2006 in New York City. To get in on this shindig, send your name and key ID code (an eight character hexadecimal number, like 807B17C1) to the e-mail address hope6keysigning (at) gmail (dot) com. Please keep in mind that to verify that your key belongs to you, you're going to have to produce identification to show to everyone, so if you want to stay on the QT, it won't be a good idea to participate.
You can also send a hyperlink to your public key on a keyserver to that address, which will allow the organisers to download the key. You'll also have to verify the unique fingerprint of your public key to authenticate it to everyone there.
The deadline by which you have to send the organisers your public key information is 1700 EST/EDT on 20 July 2006.
In case you've ever wondered just how far behind schedule the game Duke Nukem Forever is, here's everything that's happened since it was announced.
Passenger aircraft infested by mice.
So I got my hair cut tonight.
Nothing major, I assure you. I still have quite a bit of hair, more than enough to pull back into a ponytail if need be, but at the salon tonight I had about eight inches taken off of the ends all over. My hair was almost to my waist, but unfortunately it was very badly damaged below shoulder level. So badly damaged, in fact, that I had a difficult time getting anything through my hair (fingers, comb, or brush) without application of a fifty-five gallon drum of conditioner most every morning in the shower.
Hair that badly damaged snags on everything, from the buttons on my shirts to the large-toothed comb every morning, and comes out far more readily than I am comfortable with.
After lopping off the straggly bits, my hair doesn't look so thin anymore, and it's much more managable. For the hell of it, I went around tonight with my hair still mostly wet to get a sense for how it feels nowadays.
I like it. It's a good change.
I should take some photographs of it but I'd really like to shave first.
So, now that season 2/28 of Doctor Who is over, I feel that I can now write about it.
I was very disappointed in season 2/28.
Season 1/27 (I'm using split designations because some people consider this a brand-new series and should be counted from season one, but I'm a fan of the whole show, all the way back to 1963 and consider them contiguous, hiatus and all) brought with it a new incarnation of the Doctor, played by Christopher Eccleston, who did a fantastic job. He had some very good scripts to work with, and an enthusiastic Robert T. Davies backing the whole thing. The plots were tight, well written, and mysterious by turns.
Then the end of the season brought the regeneration of the Doctor into his tenth incarnation, played by David Tenant, who looks much younger and isn't nearly as good of a physical actor as Eccleston is.
I dealt with Tenant pretty well in The Christmas Invasion, which was the teaser episode shown during the Yule season of 2005. The way the Doctor's always been written, the next couple of days to weeks following a regeneration are hairy because the process never seems to go smoothly. Tenant was manic and even lipped off a couple of times, which I found amusing, to be honest. Unfortunately, the rest of the season was goofy, uncomfortably so to suit my tastes. Eccleston had the "only survivor of The Time War" schtick down pat, from the moodiness to the forced humour, which some armchair psychiatrists in the fandom have identified as post-traumatic stress disorder, what they used to call shell shock in World War II. That's not easy for an actor to pull off.
Tenant shot all the way to the other end of the emotional spectrum and more or less stayed there. I started getting really annoyed with his manic, almost Kramer-esque portrayal of the Doctor at times.
I'll admit that yes, I did like a bit of that silliness here and there, but by and large it felt very tacked on. The storylines from season 2/28 were not nearly as interesting or well assembled as those before it. There was a bit too much handwaving to really be gripping - in other words, too much "I'll say it and brush over it rapidly without explaining so no one will have time to wonder what I just said" for comfort.
Upon reflection, it was too much like a comic book for my liking. I prefer something more dense, more 'crunchy'.
The references to Torchwood were all over the place and seemingly shoehorned in wherever they would fit. I felt like I was getting poked in the cheek by them, in fact, and knowing that the series Torchwood will be starting in the fall, it rang like an advertisement.
The only episode in season 2/28 I really liked was the finale, because it had actual emotional content in it, and not just Doctor/Rose relationship fan fodder. Before anyone says anything about season 1/27, yes, I'm well aware of the Doctor/Rose/Jack subtext, but it wasn't painted all over everything like tar on a roof, very unlike the previous subtext mentioned. The finale had a little bit of the silliness that kept popping up, but it also had fear, pressure, and a healthy dose of "what IS that??"
The finale was indeed a tear jerker, and that is all that I will say on the matter to keep from spoiling it for everyone.
Okay, I'm done raving like a fanboy. Spleen internal pressure restore to normal.
Today's over and done with, and thankfully everything seems to be resolving itself as I'd hoped it would. I've just about finished studying everything that I need to study, and I'm waiting on the paperwork and the authorisation papers. I recieved my exit interview stuff from Sunrocket today, which outlines what I can and can't do, talk about, or take out patents on. It also covers my last paycheque and stuff about insurance and stock options, so that's pretty much said, done, and recorded for posterity in the news morgues. I'm still working from home though I've been getting things set up as I need them and working on a few assignments that aren't too sensitive, but are the sort of thing that gets lost in the shuffle when a high priority situation develops. It's good to be coding again.
It's also good, let me tell you, to be driving again. I spent part of this morning on the phone with my bank, coaxing them to temporarily raise my daily limit on my account so that I could get the TARDIS back from the garage. After waiting on hold for a while, I was told that this had been done until 1600 EST/EDT today, at which time the limit would revert to normal and, chance were, I wouldn't be able to make any new purchases until the limit re-set itself.
Fine. I can deal with that.
Midafternoon rolled around and I paged out to catch the courtest shuttle back to the car dealership. Minutes ticked away slowly as the lifespan of that limit increase dwindled back to normal. I saw the shuttle a block away turning around... the same driver as last time, I (correctly) guessed, who didn't know his way around my neighborhood and was going to give up. I tucked my book into my back pocket and took off at a dead run toward the van, and met up with it just as he'd gotten headed in the other direction.
I need to take up running again.
We eventually got back to the car dealership's lot, by way of many back roads along the highways to dodge traffic during the busiest time of day, the lunchtime rush. A subroutine in the left hemisphere of my brain patiently marked off each moment toward the time at which I wouldn't be able to pay for my car once again, but eventually we picked our way back to the highway, parking lot, and cashier's desk.
The cashier remembered me from yesterday. I was afraid of that.
I'm not ashamed to admit that I held my breath as my cashcard was run through the reader in the other room. One bitten, twice shy.
The cashier came back with a stack of paperwork, my car keys, and a receipt to sign. I gave my John Hancock on the little slip of thermal print paper and walked out of the place with my head held high and my pulse returning to normal. I had to wait for a flatbed truck to move out of the way so that I could hit the road once more, but I decided to take a little time to roll the windows down and get situated.
And knocked on my ass by the blast of hot air that escaped from the passenger compartment as I opened the door.
As near as I can tell, the TARDIS has been baking in the front lot of the car dealership with all of the windows closed for about five days, which heated up everything that possibly could conduct heat. Even after rolling all of the windows down and blasting the air conditioning to get an air exchange going, I still baked the entire trip home because of the heat radiating from the seats, steering wheel, floor (which is covered with dark carpet), and dashboard.
I should have tried to roast a marshmallow in there.
My car looks great.. you can't even tell where the damage was done on the left rear quarter. The body panel appears to have been entirely replaced, and I'm betting that the body panel for that door has been switched out, also.
I'll probably take a few pictures tomorrow. Don't mind the front fender, that's next on the list.
The FBI is going to have its watched and monitored Net if it's the last thing it ever does. A bill has been drafted that would require every ISP to set up central surveillance hubs to record all of their users' traffic, just as some long distance companies have. All switching and routing hardware would have remote traffic monitoring functionality built into them, all IM traffic could be recorded if deemed necessary (implementations of Jabber all use SSL, incidentally), and the Department of Justice would no longer have to public a public statement of the number of wiretaps they carried out in a given year (1773 wiretaps were approved by the court in 2005; the number of 'secret' wiretaps last year is, well, secret).
While we're on the subject of things that make you go hmm, how about this little number from Holland. It's probably not safe for work but it's not exactly explicit. Explicitly funny, yes.
This woman is taking an article at the Onion seriously.
If you've never seen it before, the Onion is pure satire. Nothing more.
I've often been tempted to set up a website of pharmacists who refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control pills and suchlike so that people can figure out where they CAN go to ge their scrips filled if they need them. I might have to expand that database to include doctors, too.
Note to self: Pick up PHP again.
So.. here's how my day went....
Astute readers should know by now that things didn't go as planned when I start an entry off thusly.
Because my new job is in paperwork hell at the moment, I'm officially working from home until Thursday or therabouts, when I'll actually be cleared to enter the building and meet my co-workers face to face, as well as actually get to talk to the HR department. Because I now work for a contracting agency in downtown DC (I'm deliberately being vague because, in the absence of official word from my boss, I don't want to give out too much information) I need to be cleared to enter secured facilities like the one that I'll be working at. This clearance hasn't gone through yet, though. That's all right, it gives me a chance to study more to get up to speed. So I spent the vast majority of the day reading and studying and finishing off the hilighter markers that I habitually carry around in my backpack.
Today went swimmingly until I discovered that my car was at the dealership, repaired, and ready to pick up. "Great!" said I, as I cleared out the rental car and set about finding the drop-off point.
It wasn't the Enterprise Rent-A-Car down the street from my apartment. It was somewhere out on the highway, where it took me a half hour just to find the bloody driveway, what with all the car dealerships on that particular stretch of pavement. Eventually, though, I did find the place, drop of the rental car, and get my bill. My $850us bill. Eighteen days... eighteen days of insurance... I really should have done the math before I set out on this particular adventure. I'll get it all back from my insurance company once I fax the receipt and some other paperwork in, but that was a bigger financial blow than I was prepared for today.
At this point, a little voice began speaking, quite reasonably, in the right hemisphere of my brain: "Hey, Bryce? You really should go home and check your bank account balance, just in case."
I ignored that little voice.
"You can always call the dealership and ask them to send a courtesy shuttle to pick you up. They're good like that."
Still, I ignored that little voice.
The Enterprise courtesy shuttle dropped me off farther down the highway at the car dealership my TARDIS is sitting patiently in the front lot of.
With a vague sense of disquiet, I strolled into the cashier's office of the car dealership, wrote out a cheque for the full amount (the price of one (1) kidney on the international black market), and handed it to the casher along with my photo ID to start the ten minute wait for approval.
There was a ten minute wait, but no approval. That's right, my cheque was turned down by my bank.
The lobes of one half of my brain shouted "WTF?!" while the others slapped their metaphorical foreheads. I began to suspect that ignoring the advice of that little part of my brain had been a very bad, to say nothing of embarassing idea.
Still, determined to salvage my dignity, I bravely handed the cheque, paperwork, and my photo ID back to the cashier. "Hang on to these, I'll see you in an hour," I said as I turned to head back home. I caught the courtesy shuttle and made it back home in about twenty minutes, sending messages from my cellphone the entire time. I left a few for Lyssa, briefing her on the entire situation.. and then realised with a more deeply sinking feeling that she'd left her cellphone on the kitchen table this morning on her way to the Metrorail station.
Fuck.
Next up was a couple of e-mails to Hasufin, asking him for a ride back to the car dealership, along with a capsule synopsis of the situation. Thankfully, he'd recovered from the anesthetic at the dentist's office earlier today and was able to respond and converse normally (so far as I could determine).
I transferred money between accounts to ensure that I had enough in my bank account (on the off chance that the cost of settling the bill at Enterprise Rent-A-Car had been to blame for my cheque being turned down) and then called up my bank to get the answer to one question: "If I transfer money into my checking account, how soon can I access the new full balance?"
The reassuring answer to that question was, "Immediately."
"Thanksthat'sallIneededtoknowbye!" <click!>
Things are never that simple.
I headed outside and caught a ride with Hausfin back to the car dealership. The cashier recognised me as I walked up and ran my cheque through the reader again. Denied. I handed over my cashcard, flush with enough money to pay for the work done on my TARDIS.
Denied.
This time, the little voices that issued from every major structure in my brain shouted in unison, "What the hell?!"
I asked, far more politely than I thought myself capable of at the time, if she could run my cheque through one last time, while I idly pondered if I'd somehow slipped through a disturbance in spacetime and wound up in a parallel universe in which I was dead broke, homeless, and writing crappy MySpace pages for food, leaving me dead broke.
Still no dice. The little printout showed that everything I'd thrown at the cash register that didn't involve a black goat, a car battery, sidewalk chalk, and a little tub of Play-Doh was turned away with a bored glare by my bank's computer network.
Hasufin and I headed back to his car, and our respective apartments before I tempted fate any further.
No sooner had we pulled into a parking space in front of my apartment building than my cellphone rang. It turned out to be someone who worked in the fraud department of my bank calling to ask about a couple of anomalous charges that had been levied against my accounts, and could I account for any of them?
At this time, I felt the cold, sticky sensation of something beyond the boundries of space and time doubling over and having a right good belly laugh, capped off with a giggle/snort.
The woman on the other end of the connection read off everything I'd bought in the past fourteen days, from the gas I'd stopped to get before turning my rental car in all the way back to my Freaks United 2006 ticket at Nation last week. Yes, I assured her, all of them were indeed things that I had dropped money on, even the buck-and-a-quarter cup of coffee on Friday afternoon. I also asked her if she could put a note on my account to the effect of "Hi. I'll be dropping a couple of grand to get my car out of hock tomorrow. Please don't freeze my account again."
Here I sit in the living room, typing this update on a laptop that says that it has a much better name that it'd like to be called by, listening to the Thai dinner that Lyssa bought for us digest, wondering if I should go out on the balcony with a goblet of Goldschlager and a clove cigarette and say, "Tomorrow will be better. Just you wait and see."
Kind of melodramatic, yes. I'm not given to such things. However, everyone has what the Lost Boys refer to as 'a moment' now and then, and I think I've had one of such this afternoon.
Interesting Firefox plugin: Gmail Space, which lets you use a configured Gmail account as a filestore. You can upload and download files from your Gmail account just like you can with a real FTP server.
This is why I love going to conventions!
Before anyone asks, no, I'm not posting this for any sneaky reason, it just struck me that a lot of the advice on this page is good advice for monogamous relationships as well as polyamorous relationships.
| Chief Surgeon You scored 83 Skills and 83 Knowledge! |
| Wow, you did it, all your hard work has paid off, once and for all you'll finally understand what it's like to get your feet wet, and get in there and put your top notch skills to work with that top notch brain power you have, that mommy and daddy paid for. I bet you don't even remember the days of being a freshman in college, I bet you hardly remember anything about your life before this point, for you there was no stopping you, you studied your ass off, and didn't kiss ass, or brown nose, or hell even boot lick. You are the cream of the crop, you now have the MD behind your name, wear it loud and proud! Because once you make one mistake, you'll never feel like this again. I wish the very best in your endovers. |
My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
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| Link: The Should you be a Doctor Test written by sluttysmurf on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the 32-Type Dating Test |
Holy shit. That was without looking anything up.
..I thought I'd have time to write but something came up. I'll write as I can.
Okay.
This is the first weekend that Lyssa and I have had to ourselve in a long while, so we've been out enjoying it. The universe has decreed that we hunt down and explore as many used and rare book shops as we could find down here.
You already know where this is going.
We've been through two of them so far, Hole In the Wall Books (no website that I know of, 905 West Broad Street, Falls Church, Virginia, 22046; phone number 703-536-2511) and Second Story Books of Rockville, Maryland. The former we visited last night on a whim, and after a certain amount of guessing found on the side of Route-7 in Falls Church. The store is a little house that has been converted into a storehouse of books of all kinds and ages. Think of your grandmother's house so packed full of old books from many eras and genres that you can't even see the walls. Hole In the Wall is close quarters no matter how you cut it, and you're going to have to hunt very carefully to find what you're looking for.
In fact, you're probably not going to find what you're looking for if you have a certain book in mind. You're going to stumble across it and a couple of others that look interesting while you prowl through the shelves. Edie, the proprietrix, is very knowledgable of many topics and she also knows where quite a bit of her stock is, once you know what you're after. She's also a flaming geek and loves comics, and has a reputation for getting women (who traditionally aren't into comic books) into comics using Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.
While it's a bit claustrophobic and lacking of technical books for my taste, an entire half of the store is dedicated out of necessitity to science fiction novels dating as far back as the 1950's, which has won it a place in my hearts. If you're in northern Virginia, by all means stop in here. Spend some time talking to Edie, she's really nice and knows her stuff.
This morning, I had to get up early because I was supposed to pick up the TARDIS at the dealership after its trip to the bodyshop. Technically, my car is fixed and waiting patiently for me, but because there's no paperwork in the cashier's office I couldn't actually pick up my car.. I can't pick it up tomorrow because the car rental place will be closed so I can't drop off my rental car or pay the bill for it, so that hamstrings things quite nicely.
Damn. I got up early for nothing. I did get to have breakfast at home for the first time in months, though.
Lyssa and I set out for Rockville, Maryland next to go through Second Story Books by way of the bakery in Vienna, Virginia. She picked up a couple of scones and we set out for the beltway, and made it in excellent time. Again, and I'm not entirely sure of how I managed this, we got turned around, thought we went in the wrong direction again, and wound up in the parking lot of the warehouse.
That's right, Second Story Books of Rockville is housed in a converted warehouse. Think of a library the size of a single floor of a good college research library, with the same calibre of books as a collegiate research library where you can purchase books.
Oh, and through the month of July, they're having a 50% off summer clearance sale.
Yeah. My spare time's taken up for the next few months.
Second Story Books has an amazing collection of books for sale on most any topic you can conceive of. Swedish art history textbooks written in German? Walk in, hang a right, straight towards the back on your right. Vintage Colin Wilson weird stuff books? Next aisle over. Science fiction or fantasy? The entire back wall, from floor to as high as a basketball player can reach. First editions? Up front, dating back to the 1800's.
They also buy and trade tomes, if you've a need to swap things out.
If you can spend an entire day browsing a store, this is the place to go.
After getting lost in the warehouse, Lyssa and I retired to a local restaurant for Thai food and then returned home for an hour. Seeing as how this was our first weekend to ourselves in too long, we didn't know what to do with ourselves and wound up hanging out with Rialian and Helen for dinner tonight at Mosaic in Rockville, Maryland.
I'm glad I'm not paying for my rental car by the mile. I'm also glad that I didn't have to fill up the tank because the price of gas down here has reached scary heights. In Maryland, at least, the cheapest gas available, 87 octane, is going for $3.23us per gallon.
That sound you just heard was my wallet screaming in pain.
In NOVA, however, gas is noticably cheaper, starting around $3.03us per gallon for the cheap stuff.
I'm really starting to get worried about this.. when I started driving, premium gas (93 octane) was $1.50us per gallon, with the cheap stuff between $1.00us and $1.15us per gallon. The price of gas has almost doubled in six years.
I'm at home right now, writing because I've had stuff on my mind. Lyssa's in the office playing Diablo II, waiting patiently for me to come in so that we can watch the end of season 2/28 of Doctor Who. I don't know about Lyssa but I've been on a self-enforced media fast about the end of this season because I didn't want any spoilers, and wanted to enjoy it. The BBC, in its infinite wisdom, spoiled a major plot point a couple of weeks ago by putting the information into the title of the news article, which meant that you couldn't avoid it. This angered not only myself, but quite a bit of the Doctor Who fandom.
One more thought for the night before I head off to watch TV with Lyssa and see what happened. One of the books I picked up last night at Hole in the Wall was Hackers, collected and edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, which is a collection of short stories about hackers (and to a lesser extent, phone phreaks). The first story of the collection is Burning Chrome, by William Gibson (the link goes right to the short story).
This story resonates with me in a curious way now. The protagonist of the story, Bobby Quine (though the story is told from the point of view of his partner and hardware jockey, Automatic Jack, I feel that Bobby really is the main character because he's the one who's laying everything he has on the line) is a cracker (a cowboy, in Gibson's parlance) of computer networks for profit. At the time of the story, Quine's 28 years old... my age, in fact.
Automatic Jack goes on to talk about how cowboys slow down in the matrix as they get older, which makes it more likely that they'll slip up at a crucial point during a run and wind up dead, a convulsing body attached to a computer that's killing them by pumping electrical feedback into their brain. Gibson, with the prescience he often showed through his earlier work, really hit a nerve with those words.
I started noticing this a couple of years ago.
As I've written in the distant past, I suffer from repeditive stress trauma, better known as carpal tunnel syndrome (the early stages, actually), brought on by spending twenty years or so sitting at a keyboard (first a manual typewriter, replaced by the keyboard of a Commodore 64 around the age of five). Twenty years of programming, writing e-mails, and logging into BBSes. Five years of building and maintaining a virtual reality. Ten years of willworking, a path called technomancy. That's a lot of wear and tear on the hands. A lot of tendons that swell from overuse, rendering the hands and fingers immobile. A lot of nerves that were pinched for so long from that swelling that the feeling never really came back, even after I stopped spending every waking moment I had on the Net. A lot of fine motor control sacrificed to learn what I know about computers, networks, software, and coding.
The circulation of blood in my hands is still compromised. I can only keep the air conditioning on in the apartment for short periods of time (much to Lyssa's chagrin, because she prefers cryogenic temperatures over my love of summer in Las Vegas, Nevada). I wake up with cold, stiff, immobile hands now and then. Sometimes the feeling in my fingertips vanishes completely, and I cut myself on sharp edges without even realising it.
You really do start slowing down around the age of twenty-five. When I was younger I could read a book and my screen, type into another window, and sing along to music all at the same time. Now it's a struggle to read a website and code at the same time. My brain can't process such large amounts of data anymore. I can't stay up as long as I used to, either. In undergrad at IUP, going three or four days without sleep was easy. I could go clubbing and go to work the next day and stay up all the next night without any problems. I taught myself C and 'traditional' UNIX (as opposed to Linux variants) that way, simply because my brain so hungered for data that I simply couldn't sleep at night.
I certainly can't type as fast as I used to anymore, either. It feels like a superhuman effort to break 100 words per minute anymore, when I used to clock in around 130 words per minute.
And, horror of horrors, when I come home at night anymore, I like to spend a couple of hours not using a computer.
I need downtime now. I need to jack out periodically and walk around, something that I so disdained when I was younger that I kept my love of exercise and weight lifting a closely guarded secret from my friends and peers (though they never seemed to care that I had a weight bench and freeweights in my lab).
Gibson's right. You slow down. You don't think as nimbly or as speedily when you hit your mid-twenties. You can't interface as tightly with computers at my age. What I love became both something more and something less than it was once. Now it's something that I can put on and take off at will, which still feels odd.
I am acutely aware of both Bobby Quine's frantic need to pull off one last heist, which would either set him up for life or kill him outright, leaving him to die in a loft strapped to a swivel chair, patched into the Net as long as his link held put. I also feel down in my bones the worry and paranoia that Automatic Jack felt, both in trying to keep his partner from going off the deep end and in his own needs and desires to just get by somehow. Not knowing what would happen.. watching technology evolve faster than you can keep up with it (forcing one to specialise in one or two fields, rather than generalise by learning about everything one can possibly get hold of).. wondering what's going to happen in the next week... I feel all of that just as surely as I feel the warmth of the sun on my face every morning.
I'm twenty-eight years old. I'm no spring chicken. My body and mind are changing, in some ways for the better, in some for the worse. I need to get a hell of a lot more exercise; my metabolism's slowing down. I certainly need to eat better. I'm getting set in my ways, in some respects. I can't stay up for days on end anymore. I have to schedule time to eat, lest my blood sugar crash and I get dizzy and faint. I'm at risk for a whole host of health problems, some of which are genetic, some of which would be results of the sort of life I live. Even now, I feel the first twinges in my wrists that mean that I should stop for a couple of minutes and rest because the delicate tissues that make up my wrists and other joints in my hands are getting overworked, and I should have used an ergonomic keyboard instead of the one on my laptop. Horror of horrors, my body doesn't regenerate the way it used to. What used to take days now can take weeks to shake off, like cuts and scrapes. Thankfully, my immune system can still take on whatever gives it shit and knock it into the middle of next week, a quality for which I am profoundly glad.
I have responsibilities in life, many more now than I did before I moved in with Lyssa down here in DC. I have a car and student loans to pay off, traffic the likes of which I've never seen before to navigate every day, and an apartment complex bigger than most buildings I've worked in housing my home and lab. I have to worry about a much higher cost of living and the fact that so much down here falls into the category of "rich folks' stuff" that I felt was so far above my station in life that I never even thought about it. It's the only game in town down here - even the familiar big chain department stores are a considerable drive down the highway from me, but the Tyson's Corner Mall is a hop, skip, and a jump away.
It's not sticker shock, it's lifestyle shock.
I don't live a life with my books and computers and fish anymore, I have a wonderful woman in my life who's as well-read and smart and eccentric as I am. That, I can assure you, I never, ever thought would happen.
Not a few of my friends are married, or are getting married soon these days. Zard and Liz back in 2002; Forge and Gypsy; Turk and Judy; Binder and his wife (whose name escapes me at the moment); all buddies whose words I knew and whose voices my subconscious conconcted long before I even cared about what they looked like or what they liked to do (to be honest; it's easy to forget that there's more to the people you type to than they write about). A few even have children now.
It's the way of things, yes. It also makes me feel, well, left out. In some ways, adrift on the seas of uncertainty, tossed about by things that they take for granted which I puzzle over, like the process of finding a house and planning a wedding.
I'm no data cowboy, though information security is one of my fascinations. Nevertheless, I do feel the need for 'that one big score' that'll put me on metaphorical easy street. I feel the need to make myself known, to do or write something that makes people sit up and take notice.
I want to join the ranks of those people I idolise, those folks whose research and posts to mailing lists have amazed and inspired me time and again over the years.
This, I suppose, is life's way of saying "Hey! It's time for you to do your thing, make your mark, leave your legacy. You don't know how long you have left so you'd better do something with what you've got!"
I'm probably going to go back and edit this some, so that it'll be more coherent and less a stream of consciousness narrative, but the gist that I'm trying to convey is this: I want to do something that advances the state of the art, something that someone will find useful and remember. Something that I can teach to people.
Hell, I'd even settle for something that someone'll read one day and come up to me at a con to say, "Hey, you wrote that one paper about $FOO? That was awesome. I really learned a lot from you about that."
Okay, so maybe it doesn't sound like much to you. It means a lot to me. I want to do something useful.
Okay, time for Doctor Who and bed. I've more to think and write about later.
What goes around really does come around.. J. Clifford Baxter, former vice-chairman of Enron, was found dead of a gunshot wound early today. Of course, the conspiracy theorists are having a field day with this, saying that someone aced him, yadda yadda, yadda.. Baxter also made millions dumping Enron stock before the company crumpled like an SUV between two tanker trucks and stayed on as a consultant while the mess was sorted out and cleaned up. No word yet if it's going to be a three-for-three.
The list of speakers at the HOPE 2006 conference is up.
Well, yesterday was my last day at Sunrocket. Thankfully, there were no major problems or crises. I've been spending the past couple of days making sure that everything was stable and running as expected. While a time consuming task, it wasn't terribly difficult, though I did have to do a bit of percussive maintenance on a couple of things to make it behave.
I learned a lot of things there.
NDAs are funny things.. there are lots of things that I'd like to say about what I did there but I'm not sure of how much would be too much. I've finally gotten to work in telecom, which I've been interested in for a while. I'm used to working in the PSTN, the public switched telephone network, which is what the vast majority of phones are connected to. Whenever you plug into the wall, that's the network that you're accessing. VoIP nets are strange things - they ride over top of the Internet that has become practically the underpinnings of the world in which we live. Broadband in the US is still primitive when compared to the net.access of other countries (in fact, the US is near the bottom of the list for speed and price) but unfortunately this is the only game in town for us, so we do the best with what we have to work with. Most people use someone's hardware, like Sunrocket's ATAs (advanced telephony adapters - microcomputers that you plug a regular phone into that act as a gateway between your phone and the Net) to place and recieve calls, though softphones are used from time to time.
Anyway, I've bored you enough with the basics of VoIP... there's lots of good data out there, which you can look up for yourself.
So I wrapped everything up yesterday. Everything that wasn't junk was backed up, notes were put in order, documents stacked not-so-neatly on my desk, and goodbyes were said. I made a lot of good friends at SR, and not a few good business contacts, and I plan on keeping in touch with them. These are some of the best telecom folks in DC, no two ways about it.
So I'm enjoying my day off. I faxed some paperwork in for Monday and if all goes well I'll be getting my car back sometime this afternoon. I'm not sure what all's going to happen this weekend, but I'm going to enjoy it as best I can. I'm thinking of going clubbing again this weekend. No reason, I just want to get out a little bit.
Somebody did the entirity of the movie Ghostbusters as an animated .gif.
And now, for your web browsing pleasure, South Park characters done as manga!
Alec Muffet, the coder responsible for the security tool Crack, was reportedly in a motorcycle accident in France. He's conscious but badly hurt.
The world of industrial espionage has been turned on its ear by honestly of all things: Three employees of Coca-Cola tried to sell the formula for and samples of a new drink to PepsiCo, who then turned around and warned Coca-Cola. The suspects tried to sell the data and samples for $1.5mus. Coke thanked PepsiCo for its assistance.
It remains to be seen how well this will work, or even if anyone will ever find out about it, but it's interesting nonetheless: Microsoft has started an open source plugin for Office 2007 and earlier that lets you save and load documents in the Open Document Format, instead of the supposedly open XML+plus stuff format that they natively implement. Governmental bodies around the world have been complaining that Microsoft changes its document formats with every revision of Office (and sometimes after it releases patches for same) and they have problems exchanging documents within the organisation itself, let alone with other people. Demands that they support the ODF are finally being listened to. The goal of the project is to have a working open source plugin by 2007. Of course, some features of word documents (like embedding .pdfs in .doc files) won't be supported.. mention of that seems like a smokescreen to me. "Oh, sure, you can use another document format.. but some things will break. Why would you want to switch if you knew that?"
Here's an honest question: Who actually uses all of those document options? Who really makes use of the ability to embed a playing .avi file in a word document? Who actually still uses WordPerfect clipart?
Just because you can doesn't mean that you should, or that anyone is actually going to make use of it.
Hee hee hee.. haute courture tinfoil hats. Too bad that tinfoil hats actually concentrate hypnorays into the brain fnord.
If I'd had one of these when I was younger, your world would be a very different place...
So.. let me see.. a couple of adventures were had on an otherwise lazy Fourth of July yesterday by Lyssa, Jean, and myself.
First off, I discovered the hard way that you can't use Brummel and Brown (a butter substitute primarily composed of yogurt) to make eggs over easy, especially if the pan in question is very large. They make decent scrambled eggs, though. That really isn't much of an adventure, though.
During an earlier trip Lyssa and I discovered a store tucked off of the main drag while on a wrong turn, the storefront for Anime Pavilion, which I thought until then was a net.business only. They do indeed have a little hole-in-the-wall store on the outskirts of Vienna, Virginia in the basement of a professional building.
Now, don't get me wrong. I've bought stuff from these folks at conventions in the past and been very satisfied with my purchases. Their storefront, however, is very cluttered and disorganised. Maybe it was just the shipping modules that were stacked six or seven deep in the store, maybe it was the fact that merchandise was stacked every which way on every horizontal surface, maybe it was the claustrophobic feel (and maybe it was the kid behind the cash register who answered "No," to the question from his boss "Would you like to ring these people up?" that really rubbed me the wrong way). Their storefront is in dire need of a cleanout, from floor to ceiling.
Guys, I know that you're going to read this sooner or later, but please, it's very difficult to find anything specific in your store. Please rearrange it a little.
They've got some Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children statuettes for a good price, and most every Fullmetal Alchemist and Ghost In the Shell patch in release, which Lyssa and I bought one each of. Hers have already been attached to her combat fatigues, and I've yet to decide what to do with my own. Jean was nonplussed, or at least seemed to be. The oppressive heat and humidity had us down for most of yesterday, to the point where Jean and Lyssa napped for part of the afternoon. I tried but wasn't able to sleep, so I wound up studying for a while to kill time. Later in the afternoon, a sudden summer rainstorm kicked up, which soaked the area once again and sent the trees swaying dangerously.. the grounds crew still hasn't taken care of the branches that were torn down by the storms this weekend past, incidentally.
Hasufin and Mika came over later in the afternoon, while Lyssa was making dinner (turkey burgers) and I was cleaning up the dining room and living room. This weekend past, Hasufin made a cheesecake to share with everyone, which wound up being dessert for everyone. We made a meal out of turkey burgers and chips and spent the evening talking and generally having a good time. Hasufin isn't much of a concert goer, and Mika is taking classes again and was more concerned with school than a concert, which is only understandable.
We parted ways around 2030 EST/EDT last night after getting ready and getting Chandler the puppy secured in his crate. On the Fourth of July, it's not fun trying to navigate in the DC area because everyone and their backup is parked at the side of the road watching their local fireworks.. traffic was nearly at a standstill down here because there were cars parked two lanes deep on either side of the highway watching local fireworks or the display at the capital. Most of the side-ramps from I-395 were blocked off, and the ramp that leads to the parking lot of the Pentagon (which is where everyone seems to wind up by accident at least once a year down here) was sealed off by police, so that limited the number of mistakes that we could have made. Still, we missed our turn off once again (for the last time because all of the nightclubs down by the naval shipyards are being closed down for demolition - Freaks United 2006 was the very last event at Nation) and wound up stuck in one of the parts of town that everyone hears about but not many people actually see.
It's one thing to drive through a bad neighborhood. It's quite another to do so when visibility has been reduced dangerously by the smoke of fireworks set off in the streets and the haze of the earlier rainstorm evaporating. Oh, and throw in streets that are one-way only at random intervals...
Amazingly, we found our way there after picking our way through the traffic and fireworks, and asking for directions from a helpful police officer, who put us within spitting distance of Nation. Once we were pointed in the right direction, we only had to follow the obvious clubgoers to find parking.
We got there around 2130 EST/EDT last night, in plenty of time to catch the band we were there to see, Iris, at 2215 EST/EDT. We ran into Pegritz there, who showed us around and introduced us to a couple of artists (including a very talented photographer) and a few of his friends. We ran into Arcane Matt on the dancefloor just after Iris took the stage, and wound up spending the entire concert with Pegritz, Matt, and their friends.
Iris put on an amazing show - their first in the US in at least a year, give or take. Reagan's voice is stronger than it had been in previous shows (so Pegritz tells me) and it was very, very clear. There were just three folks on stage last night, Reagan, Andrew, and one other guy whose name I don't recall off the top of my head (I want to say his name was Matt). They played a lot of stuff off of their new album, entitled Wrath, along with a few songs from Awakening and one or two off of Disconnect. While Awakening and Wrath aren't my absolute favourite Iris albums (I miss their older, more synthesiser-oriented sound) there are still a couple of tracks that I really enjoy on those two albums. I think we drove some of the audience nuts because the pack of us at the back of the dance floor were singing along most of the time... we're Iris fans. The only thing we didn't do was hold up lit cigarette lighters for Sorrow Expert.
They did do a version of Annie, Would I Lie To You that nearly brought the house down, and came out to do an encore for us.
They left the stage around 2330 EST/EDT or therabouts - I don't know because I wasn't keeping track.
I chanced to run into Andrew and Matt-from-Iris later in the night and congratulated them on an awesome show. Lyssa and I bought Iris t-shirts, of course. No one save Pegritz recognised my Summer Synthpop 2000 shirt, sadly. I spotted Reagan briefly but didn't have an opportunity to speak to him or get an autograph. Mental note: Next time bring the CD case into the club with me.
The DJs between shows were quite good, and their sets kept all of us (even Jean) on the dance floor until the next bad started playing. I caught most of the set done by the next band, the name of which I don't recall but have some swag for that I'll look at when I get home.
We wound up leaving the club around 0100 EST/EDT today because I had to work today.. somehow we made it home in decent time and after inflating the mattress for Jean again, I crashed for work this morning.. somehow I got up feeling what passes for normal for me - not tired at all.
Okay. That catches me up for today.
I just found out - my car is almost ready at the shop. I should be able to pick it up on.. drumroll please...
Friday.
One more day to go at Sunrocket. It feels strange.. I've been here just a shade over a year now and I'm taking off for another company. It's been great working here, I have to admit. SR's a good shop, and all things considered I've learned a lot and met a lot of good folks. I also solved some very interesting problems, which is always a treat. But all things must come to an end, and this is no exception.
We'll see what tomorrow brings.
What goes around comes around... Kenneth Lay, founder of Enron, the company that screwed most of its employees as it collapsed under its own weight, dropped over dead at the age of 64 while awaiting sentencing for his role in the Enron scandal.
I just found out that Jean somehow managed to get hurt last night.. one of the teens wearing platform shoes more tall than their bodies were stepped on her while she was on the dance foor somehow. The bruising is pronounced and looks pretty nasty, even though it's superficial.
Happy Fourth of July, everyone in the United States.
It's been an interesting weekend, to be sure.. but a fun one, mostly.
Friday night, Lyssa and Jean wanted to go to the movies to catch the premiere of Superman Returns. I'm not a fan of Superman, so I had planned on hanging out in the bookstore with a cup of coffee working on a project or two of mine (burn_dvd is now at v2.0 - check out my projects page for more information), but as things are wont to do, plans changed subtly in mid-flight. After we finally decided on where to get dinner (Anita's, in Vienna, Virginia) and hauled out there, we still had some time to kill, so we got dessert at the Tuscan Grille, their three-for-three combination of desserts to share, and sundry coffees with noticable amounts of alcohol (Italian coffee and fine brandy are an amazing combination, and good for inducing a state that Spider Robinson calls 'isometric consciousness'). Unfortunately, we discovered too late that tickets for Superman Returns had been sold out for some time, so the best we could manage was hanging out at Barnes and Noble for a time and then heading home. Jean and Lyssa roamed around the store while I took up a position in the cafe' and worked on my projects. I even made considerable progress on one of them by the time the store began to close at 2245 EST/EDT and they threw us out.
All dressed up with nowhere to go, we returned home to hang out and play with Chandler (Jean's.. well.. technically a 'puppy' though he's almost fully grown, from a structural point of view) the border collie (or at least he has more than a passing resemblance to one).
Saturday was our day to roam around downtown DC with Jean and do the tourist thing. Once we got ourselves up and dressed we tracked down a small bakery in Vienna that we've heard so much about.. unfortunately, I didn't grab a business card while I was there because they didn't have any left, so I'll have to dig up the name of it when I get home tonight. Their bread, however, gives Zingerman's a real run for its money. I highly suggest getting the fruit and sourdough - it's simply amazing. We could not think of a better way to start off a Saturday morning.
The Metrorail system was packed with tourists visiting DC, many for the first time, so a ride downtown took better than an hour instead of the usual half-hour jaunt. Also, they were working on the blue line, so they had to redirect trains onto the same railset, which further complicated things. Once we made it downtown to the Capital Mall, though, we found ourselves in the middle of the National Heritage Festival, I think it was. Tents and displays and the whole nine yards all over the place, and people packed three deep. The three of us wandered around a little bit to get oriented but eventually we found our way to the Museum of Natural History in downtown DC.
The building's bloody huge, with three publically accessible floors and one top floor that's for staff only. Because it's so large and there were so many people in the museum we could only see a couple of the exhibits, namely the rocks and minerals and some of the mammalian life exhibit. The rocks and minerals were nothing short of amazing. They've got samples of huge size - like a block of topaz that easily weighs ten pounds, yellow, blue and red diamonds (coloured diamonds are rare), and veins of opal from Australia.
They even have the Hope Diamond on display, which I wasn't terribly impressed with, I have to say. It's a pretty diamond necklace, yes, but the history of the gem aside it was actually dwarfed next to some of the other exhibits (like the six-pound uncut emerald crystal in the same room). There was an antique necklace on display also, which shows what can be done with diamonds: The diamond itself is only a fraction of an inch thick, but the cut and setting are such that you'd swear that it was one or more inches in thickness - the refracted light has the same effect of such a gemstone yet is much thinner.
I remain surprised that there were no protestors around the evolutionary science exhibit.
We finally left the museum around 1800 EST/EDT on Saturday, worn out from the crowd of people we'd been stuck in for so many hours, the heat, and the humidity.
Oh, did I mention that it hit 100 degrees Farenheit outside on Saturday?
The three of us got back onto the Metro and headed for home, by way of the bakery that we'd had lunch at earlier, Giant, and Whole Paycheque to get stuff for dinner, which took the form of fresh bread, cheese, fresh strawberries, and cold cuts with a cold bottle of wine. Lyssa and I haven't done that in a long, long while, so we enjoyed the downtime thoroughly. Later in the evening, Kash and Duo arrived, announcing that Kash had closed the deal on his new car, followed by Hasufin and Mika.
We didn't actually do anything on Saturday night. I wrote. Kash and Lyssa played video games. Duo and Jean played with Chandler. Duo and Chandler bonded curiously well, much to the amusement of everyone.
Laying on the floor Saturday night, Chandler gifted me with a sloppy kiss that somehow managed to get behind my eyeglasses and hit tissue. My eye immediately turned red and puffy as my body's immune system detected dog saliva and went bonkers fighting it off. A few litres of water and saline solution later and I could see decently well out of my left eye but it still felt like someone had packed the socket with dry cotton, a sensation that would persist until late Sunday morning.
On Sunday morning, Kash and Duo headed out to find breakfast before most of us were awake. Lyssa made eggs and biscuits with pork roll, and we spent a quiet morning sitting around. After breakfast, Kash, Duo, and I headed out to pick up Kash's new car, by way of the house of Rialian and Helen to drop off the old car, Smurf. We hit the beltway for a quick jaunt to drop off the old car and then found our way to the car dealership. I killed a few minutes while Kash got the keys and situated and then we trucked for home to pick up their stuff. After returning, Kash and Lyssa went shopping while Jean read (she's almost done with all of the Dresden Files novels, when last I checked), and I wrote.
The rainstorm that hit really put a damper on things, to the tune of a large branch that was torn off of a tree behind my apartment building and dashed to the ground (photographs forthcoming) and rain that blew sideways, disrupting power (probably because the dodgy power lines around the back were jostled around a good bit), but eventually they arrived safe and sound, with food and a new slow cooker in tow.
Safeway late on Sundays, it should be noted, is not a good time to get groceries. The pork tenderloin they bought was spoiled when the package was opened.
As a result, we wound up going out for burritos after everyone else left.
To finish off the night, we started watching an older anime series called Slayers, which I've been hearing a lot about but have only seen the movie (which is usually nothing like the series) of. The fairest thing I can say about it is that it's comedic fantasy, with plenty of references to being in a cartoon ("That's more stock dialogue!") and not taking itself seriously at all. I've decided to give it a try because it's been so highly recommended to me. Ordinarily, it's the sort of thing I'd put on for noise while I did other stuff around the house.
In response to the outcry over WGA last week, Microsoft has officially denied that systems not running WGA will be crippled, but that installations of Windows Vista will have to be activated in a different manner because, surprise surprise, registration codes are still being pirated all across the world. They're also being sued in the District Court of Seattle, Washington because the WGA functionality violated antispyware laws, or at least that's how it's being spun by industry pundits.
Antispyware laws that have done precisely jack to curb the thousands of applications out there that surreptitiously install themselves, change where hyperlinks go to, record surfing data, and fill screens with popups, but I digress.
If you'd like to remove the WGA hotfix permanantly, use RemoveWGA.
A court filing states that the NSA had AT&T set up those monitoring stations well before 11 September 2001. A lawsuit filed by customers of BellSouth and Verizon alleges that this surreptitious monitoring of telephone traffic violates the Telecommunications Act of 1934 as well as the US Constitution, and they seek monetary damages for same. This shoots the official edict that such measures were necessary after 9/11 because they were in use well before 9/11 even happened. The DoJ is claiming that none of the companies named in the lawsuit are allowed to say anything because it would be a threat to national security.
Late last night, Jean, an old friend of Lyssa's, and her puppy Chandler arrived in DC. They'd been on the road since 1130 EST/EDT yesterday morning and got caught in the bridge-and-tunnel rush hour traffic on I-95, which effectively brought them to a halt for most of the afternoon. On top of that, they had to take the Beltway to get down here, and that tends to be a parking lot until 1900 EST/EDT or so during the week. Thankfully, though, everyone made it safely. Chandler seems to have taken a liking to me. It's a strange picture, to be sure: A dog and a a cat playing together.
It's well-known these days that the NSA is watching everything it possibly can inside the United States, from telephone traffic to e-mail. They're also watching social networking sites like MySpace and LiveJournal to figure out who's into what and who's talking to whom. It's been a fact since the get-go that whatever you publish on the net is available to everyone, so this should come as no surprise. You've probably heard my rants about common sense and publishing information about yourself in the past. What I will say is that in this day and age, when a cursory background check can be done by anyone with net.access and Google, anything is fair game. When this becomes the hot new technology, expect user information to either be deleted by people or changed such that the profiles are no longer accurate. The following quote from the series Cowboy Bebop comes immediately to mind: The profile on the perpetrator is that he is a seven foot tall ex-basketball player, hindu guru, drag queen alien.
It's also very possible that people will begin creating spurious personalities on the Net to foil this sort of analysis for fun (and profit, because anything can be sold these days, for good or for ill).
The open source movement should sit up and take notice of what's been going on in the courts lately: Open source developers are now being sued over questionable patents. Redhat, which just purchased the the company jBoss, which manufactures a Java development component called Hibernate, which makes it easier to write database-aware Java applications by encapsulating rows in database within Java objects instead of returning them as text strings that then have to be picked apart and finangled with in sundry other ways to get them into a usable state. A company called FireStar is suing them for violating patent 6,101,502. The thing is, there are loads of prior art for this patent - as long as object-oriented design and databases have existed at the same place in history, people have developed objects which do just that. jBoss just did it for Java and made it available. The other case isn't aimed at a big company but a guy named Bob Jacobson, who wrote some software that controls model railroad sets. He's being billed for $200kus by the company KAM, which filed a patent for controlling model railroads via transmitted messages between multiple devices (I'm actually paraphrasing - if you read the patent linked off of that article, it's even more vague than that). There's prior art for that, too, namely, the system developed by hackers at MIT for the Tech Model Railroad Club back in the early 1960's.
Remember the hullabaloo over the Windows Genuine Advantage patch released by Microsoft that phones home? I can't verify this, because someone posted a snippet of a conversation that was ostensibly from Microsoft Tech Support, but installs of Windows that don't have WGA installed might be killed sometime this fall. An e-mail was sent to Microsoft for confirmation of this, and it came back that "customers may be required to participate," end of story. Whatever that means.
Okay.. I'm not sure about this. To shut down a box remotely (however you decide to define it) one of two things has to happen: Either the box has to phone home and during the course of that, a shutdown directive has to be recieved, or the box has to be listening on the global Net, contacted by MS, and commanded to shut down. The WGA hotfix is known to phone home to Microsoft at least once per month, so this is actually feasible if it were true. However, it is installed copies of Windows that do not have this hotfix installed that are at risk, so the first possibility is ruled out. That leaves MS contacting that subset of boxen and telling them to shoot themselves in the CPU. That is much less likely because a good many systems are behind firewalls of some kind, be it a NATting Linksys/Cisco router or a corporate firewall or what have you. The number of exposed Windows boxen is growing steadily smaller as people either buy or are given NATting routers by their ISPs.
Hmmm..
Another possibility that I can see is a future hotfix, automagically installed, checking for the presence of the WGA functionality and shutting the machine down. That would explain why it's getting harder to deactivate the Automatic Update function of later versions of Windows (and was actually why the poster I linked to was calling Microsoft, to learn how to do this). As strange as it might sound, automatically patching systems isn't always a good idea, especially when you take into account the fact that many of these patches require a reboot to take effect.
Picture this: A large corporate data centre filled with Windows Server 2000 and 2003 installs, most to all of which have Automatic Update turned on. More or less at the same time, they all phone home to MS, download patches (which puts a hurt on the network connection to the data centre), install them (which might break applications running - that's why you set up a lab to test patches before you install them in production - check out the WGA complaints in that article for examples), and reboot.
A big chunk of your production network suddenly reboots simultaneously. Isn't that a wonderful thought?
GovTrack.us, a really cool website that breaks down votes in the senate and what happens in the public records, has published a blow-by-blow of S.2686, famous for not including network neutrality. Something fishy's going on, here, which I'll write about later. Suffice it to say for the moment that the news I've been getting from a couple of related mailing lists isn't jiving with the Senatorial records and what my local Senate representative's office told me when I called them this afternoon.
Generic government monitoring news article template.
There is now a certification for Snort, the open-source network intrusion detection system. To be certified as a Snort Certified professional, you have to be knowledgable in everything from IDS/IPS theory to configuring and fine-tuning Snort to how to write Snort signatures.
If you've been on the Net for a while you've probably heard about Nigerian 419 scams, where someone will e-mail you and ask you to launder a couple of hundred thousand dollars through your bank accounts for some reason if you front them a few thousand dollars, and in return you'll get to keep a percentage of the profits. Some people have fallen for these scams to the tune of their life savings, but others enjoy torturing these spammers in new and inventive ways. Take, for example this howlingly funny exchange between a 419 scammer and scambaiter Shiver Metimbers, who managed to get a wood carving of a Commodore-64 out of the scammer!
Researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada have developed a device that can be used to regenerate teeth and bones in the mouth. The device uses pulses of ultrasound to stimulate the jawbones and teeth of patients into regrowing much faster and more thoroughly than they would without encouragement. Dozens of test subjects experienced tissue regeneration within four (4) months of daily treatment. While I feel that their speculations on other applications of this technology are premature (using such a device to get taller?), this represents a solid advance in medical technology.
The network neutrality vote happened yesterday and the US Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee voted against it. This makes it more legally permissible for the big backbone companies, like Qwest, Global Crossing, and Wiltel to charge people extra to give their traffic higher priority in the routers. Companies that could afford the extra charges will definitely get their traffic through in both directions, while everyone else might not.. or might not even be allowed to provide services to the Net, and would be usable only as browsing clients.
Think of it like this: I own Main Street, Anytown, USA. I let cars drive on Main Street, which is what streets are for. If you pay me $100us per month, I will let you drive at 60 miles per hour down the street whenever you want, take any of the side streets you want, and not have to wait in line. If you don't pay me that $100us per month, you can only drive at 10 miles per hour down the street and you'll have to drive through heavily armoured and guarded gates at either end of Main Street, whether you're an ambulance with a code blue in the back or a hippie driving a Volkswagon Rabbit covered with Phish stickers. If the volume of traffic is too high (arbitrarily decided by me) you might not be allowed to go anywhere, and would have to pull over to the side of Main Street until I told you otherwise.
Carbon dioxide grenades are a terrorist weapon?
Bell Sympatico of Canada began monitoring the net.traffic of all of its customers on 15 June 2006.
Remember those numbers station-like phone numbers that were popping up on Craig's List a few weeks ago? Two developments on that front. One, a few more popped up not long after those articles came out. Two, they were set up by the organizers of the Hackers On Planet Earth conference as a promotion. If you managed to break the code and e-mail the address hidden in the cyphertext, you could get free registration to HOPE 2006.
I had a hell of a dream early this morning.. I dreamed that I was in the hospital with a bladder infection and that they were trying to drain the blood out of my bladder to relieve the pressure.
Yeah, it's pretty nasty. I gets worse:
The dream ended with the surgeons doing the deed (I'm trying not to be overly graphic, here), and watching a little of the discharge come out of the end of the (now extracted) catheter and run onto a clean white gauze pad.
Next stop: Image dictionaries when I get home. This one's a doozy.
Since my TARDIS went into the shop for bodywork I've been driving around in a rental car, which necessitated pulling all of the CDs out of the car for safe keeping. For the hell of it I've been flipping through my CD collection and pulling out old favourites to listen to for a change of pace. Tuesday evening for fun I decided to listen to the soundtrack to the movie Hackers, which had some great techno on it for its time (though a lot of the tracks first appeared in the US on an import album called Technoheadz that's kind of hard to find these days). Songs like those that I used to crank in the car with my buds as we'd hit the road for whatever adventures seventeen year old computer geeks used to have.
They don't move me, anymore.
Underworld, Kruder and Dorfmeister.. on a lark I dug out some MP3s of other bands that I used to really enjoy, like 187 (where did she go?) the Shamen, the Utah Saints... same thing.
The songs feel dated, disconnected. I feel like I love the memories of them and how they used to make me feel, but the songs themselves don't click with me anymore.
Maybe it's the homogenisation and commercialisation of techno that happened around '97 or therabouts. That's usually what takes the magick out of a style of music. Maybe it's the fact that I haven't been a raver or a DJ for many years. Maybe it's because I just burned out on the whole thing and looked elsewhere for music that stirred my biomechanical soul.
It's for certain, now: I'm getting old.
Maybe 'maturation' is a better word for it. I'm more aware of my limits now, and what I do and don't want out of this life. I'm definitely a great deal more picky about things.
I finally admitted to myself that I've reached that phase in my life where I'm looking backward to the music that I grew up listening to.. the music that was on the radio when I was very, very small, about four years of age or so. Back when WBZZ/B-94 FM in Pittsburgh was a fledgling radio station with a tiny transmitter, as commercial radio stations go, and still advertising on KDKA-TV. New wave and synthpop and the earliest versions of hair metal, what some folks nowadays call 'cock rock' (don't ask).
Okay, so hair metal is a guilty pleasure of mine. But I can't deny that I love the sounds of analogue synthesisers, early drum machines with the processing power of my pager, tape loops, and keyboard guitars.
One might carefully call that conditioning. I call it what I grew up listening to, music from a happier time, when all I was worried about was when I'd get to go to kindergarten to see my friends, when I'd get to drive to the grocery store with my grandmother, and when my next fix of markers and Lego blocks would come.
Simple days. Simple times.
A time when I wasn't being bombarded by people with haunted eyes, twitching fingers, shirt pockets full of cigarettes, and the unmistakable feeling that the world was indeed a scary, fucked-up place where people can't seem to get along and the slightest slip during a conference might easily cause a war. When war was a three-letter word that my mind was too small to wrap around. I knew that it was 'bad' but not what it meant. A time when I innocently picked up every last detail in the world but not the nuances. Sort of like reading 2001 or Neuromancer for the first time. There's so much there, you can't apprehend all of it the first time.
I've decided to be happy.
Work and stress and worry and all that sort of thing are part and parcel of being an adult, and always have been. You grow up, you get responsibilities and obligations, and you have to take care of them. The story of life since the first hominids stood erect, probably earlier. But that doesn't mean that these things have to become everything in your life.
I do the work thing. That's a given. I decided, though, that I'd do work that not only supported my lifestyle but also made me happy. That's why I'm a professional computer geek: I love being a geek, so why not get paid for it?
I have friends that love me, and I them. That makes me happy.
I have a wonderful girlfriend who lives me, and I her. That makes me happy.
I'm getting back into not only writing but coding to see what I can make my computers do. That makes me happy.
I've realised that (the indefinite) you can't be happy unless you decide to let yourself be happy. There are innumerable deadlines, panicky phone calls, ringing phones, buzzing pagers, and dozens of e-mails per second piling up in your life every second of every day, but it's important to remember that isn't your life! You can step away from it whenever you want to take a break. Sometimes you have to postpone it until the current crisis is over (it just doesn't work if most of your employers' production network blows up in your face and you decide to take a vacation, that's part of having responsibilities) but when it's done you can damn sure go home and kick back with a cup of tea and a comic book no matter how old you are. It doesn't make you any less professional or dedicated to go dancing once in a while, or go fishing with your kids, or even run down the street after the ice cream truck.
The world can burn itself out as much as it wants. That doesn't mean that I have to let the world burn me to a crisp along with it.
It's finally stopped raining in DC, at least for a while. This morning I was awakened by a bright lance of sunlight that found a way through the blinds in the bedroom, most uncharacteristic of the week thus far. I think the rains are finally over for a time, and the land down here will have a chance to dry itself out and shake itself off. The air is cool but the humidity is definitely noticable and not quite comfortable.
I've been thinking lately about diaries.
I use these memory logs as much as a diary as a soapbox about whatever topics strike my fancy, not only to share parts of my life with the Net at large but to make information available that someone, some time in the future might have a need for. I try to make them as interesting as I can as often as time permits. Sometimes genuinely funny or strange things happen to me, sometimes I'm just in the right place at the right time with my eyes open.
Lately, though, life's been quiet. Not much has been going on of note, and so I haven't felt the need to describe that lack of events in mind-numbing detail. If I felt the need, it would probably read something like this:
Woke up. Took a shower, woke Lyssa up, got dressed. Made lunch, packed my things for work, fed the fish. Got the rental car, picked Lyssa up at the front of the building, dropped her off at work. Drove to work. Walked from the garage to the office building. Dropped my stuff off, got a cup of coffee, sat down to read my e-mail, opened the latest revision of my memory logs and began to type as I found a minute here and there. Opened a couple of newswires in my web browser and started to get my daily fix of world events. Started working after about an hour or so, once I'd gotten settled in and my finished my first cup of coffee. Started handling problems and sundry emergencies as they arose. Had lunch. Went to a meeting or two. Left work to go home when I could. Changed clothes, worked out, left to pick up Lyssa from work. Came home, made dinner. Relaxed. Wrote. Caught up with friends' weblogs. Went to bed.
As I said, there isn't much to it. I won't bore you any more with it.
Something that I've been considering lately is migrating these memory logs over to a real weblogging system of some kind. I've been looking around at some of the more popular packages, like Wordpress, and some of the lesser-known ones, like Blosxom and BashBlogger. My initial experiments with Blosxom were failures because I'm having trouble getting CGI support working under Apache v2.2, namely, I couldn't get Apache to execute the scripts as necessary. At this point in time I'm more inclined to not go the CGI route and use a PHP-based app of some kind, but first I need to get PHP compiled. Another problem that I will need to solve is migrating the memory log archives (all four-plus years of them) into the new weblogging system. From the thirty-thousand foot view, that will be pretty simply given a sufficiently featureful Perl script. If the new app is based on a database, it will still be easy to do, so long as the schema makes sense. Again, Perl would be the perfect utility for the job.
One of the reasons that I'm looking at migrating to a real weblogging system is because the hassle of archiving everything when the files get too large to load is getting to me. Another is that I'd like to set up an RSS or ATOM feed of some kind so that the weblog search engines like Technorati will actually pay attention to my site, to bring more people in. Also, not a few people have contacted me privately to say that they wanted to leave comments to certain posts but couldn't because, well, I didn't have any way of doing so. It's become a prevalent enough question that I think that I should make that available. I toyed with writing a comment CGI script on my own but again, problems with getting Apache's CGI support working have more or less nixed that idea. On the other hand, I don't want the weblogging system to completely replace my site. My homepage might not be much but I did put a lot of time and effort into writing it, and I don't want to have to install a bunch of other applications to re-implement my photo album, random notes, and suchlike. If it's going to come to that, I may as well design my own from scratch.
A few people have suggested that I drop everything and just set up an account on a public service, like Blogger or MySpace. There are two reasons for that: One, I don't much trust code that I can't look at myself - case in point cross-site scripting vulnerability in Livejournal and other sites using its code earlier this year. The other reason comes from what happened to mp3.com years ago, which is that it was bought out and all of the .mp3's on the site became the sole property of the new owner. That doesn't fly with me. That can't happen if I run my own site, independent of an owning or governing body.
Decisions, decisions...
The aftermath of flooding in DC is extensive. Both the National Archives and the headquarters of the IRS are closed, for example.
Here's an update on the Freaks United 2006 festival on 4 July 2006: Andrew of the band Iris says that they'll be going on later in the evening, around 2200 EST/EDT.
Yeah, you can tell who I really want to see, can't you?
Someone's been doing som research on how the great firewall of China does what it does, and how to keep it from working in many cases. The actual content analysis is not performed by the routers themselves but by small clusters of computers linked directly to them. If there is a match in the database of naughty net.content, the routers are instructed to fire RST packets (in TCP/IP, this means that the connection is aborted and should be reset, thus RST) to both ends of the connection, thus severing the link. Configuring a firewall to ignore RST packets in general is pretty easy, and with a little deep analysis only the forged RST packets could similiarly be ignored.
Well, this rates on my weirdness meter, and that's pretty hard to do these days: What appears to be a four foot long leopard shark was found in Hesperia, California. No one knows how the hell it got there, but when it was found it was dead for about an hour.
One George Pantazopoulos is re-implementing the SID chip as an FPGA. Yay!
It's finally stopped raining. Traffic is flowing more or less normally in the DC area these days.
The surrealist musical art group called the Residents is releasing a new album called River of Crime, which is patterned after the 'true crimes' radio shows of the 20's and 30's with a twist: The CDs you buy will be blank. You're supposed to go to the website for the band to download the individual tracks as they come out, as well as high-resolution images of disk labels.
In stark contrast to the lists of most influential folks in the industry that often appear in glossy industry magazines, CNN has compiled a list of 10 ten least influential people in business. Rounding out the top three are Bill Ballmer of Microsoft, Jeffrey Citron of Vonage, and Reed Hastings of Netflix.
Gary Numan will be playing the 9:30 club on Wednesday, 9 August 2006!
It's still bloody raining in DC. Parts of downtown DC, like the Capital City Mall (where the reflecting pool is) are flooded and inaccessible. The yard behind my apartment complex is so waterlogged that it's beginning to resemble the neighborhood swimming pool. At least one frog has moved in and taken up residence in what now passes for a swamp and is treating us to an impressively loud courtship call every couple of seconds, loud enough that Lyssa and I can hear it over the rain inside of our doss while the air conditioning is running.
I knew I should have bought an inflatable raft. We'll need it to get to the car pretty soon.
Work thus far today has been interesting, to say the least. It rained for most of last night in the DC metropolitan area, and the power was shaky, to say the least, for a good portion of the evening. I hear that we got about eleven inches (27.94 cm) of rain in total last night. This rain caused a mudslide that knocked out a good portion of the Metrorail system, the vast subway complex that links DC proper, Virginia, and Maryland. The Beltway is also crippled in places due to mudslides and flooding. This morning after we got up, Lyssa checked the local news and discovered, to her chagrin, that delays up to two hours in length on the Metro had snarled the Monday morning commute horribly. She's decided to work from home today because there's an excellent change that she wouldn't make it in to work on time today.
The Washington Post Has an article on it here.
I had my own bit of fun early this morning. The power is out to over 75% of the building I work in, so only one elevator was running, and a good portion of the office's IT infrastructure was knocked offline to boot. I left the office to find an extension cord that was a) long enough to reach some equipment in the server room, and b) could carry enough power to do so safely. By the time I got back the power was, of course, back on but the environment control system in the complex is still offline. I'm sitting in my office dripping with sweat and feeling like I'd like to curl up under a desk to take a nap.
Interesting times.
Valence Media, the organisation that runs the famous BitTorrent tracker search engine TorrentSpy has filed documents in the court that name one Robert Anderson as the cracker who compromised their network, as well as a statement written by Mr. Anderson that says that the Motion Picture Association of America contacted him and asked him to gather information on their behest, one way or another.
The very same folks who cheerfully leaked Valerie Plame's name and status as a CIA opertive to the US news media, blowing her cover permanantly, are calling for the New York Times to be brought up on charges for 'compromising America's anti-terrorist policies' because they're writing and publishing critical articles. Representative Peter King of the state of New York accused the Times because they published an article about the Treasury Department monitoring cash transfers into and out of the country in an attempt to suss out transfer of funds to terrorist cells.
Pot, meet Kettle. Kettle, meet Pot. Fight nice, you two!
Environment control has finally been restored to my building.
A user of the graphical virtual environment Second Life named Seifert has figured out how to build a house out of a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube. You can walk through the house in a straight line and find yourself right back where you started, as if you were walking on a Mobius strip that twists back upon itself in every direction you can walk in. Virtual gravity also does not work the same way in that sector, because all six sides of each room are furnished to some extent. The way that Seifert implemented the Crooked House is quite novel: The rooms themselves disconnect themselves, move, and reconnect themselves to implement the warped space inside the construct.
It's risky to have fun at airports these days, but this is just beautiful. There are even .mp3 recordings of the announcements on this page.
WinFS won't be a part of Windows Vista. Film at eleven. They're going to roll most of its functionality into the next release of SQLserver and ADO.NET.
It's still raining. The backyard of my apartment building is all but flooded. A couple of nightclubs have cancelled their nights tonight. There are not good signs.
Busy day.. long day.. slept like a log last night.
Quick heads-up about the game Left Behind: Eternal Forces, which is based upon the series of novels of the same name: It's packed full of spyware manufactured by the company Double Fusion (the names of software companies are finally starting to sound like the names of companies in Walter Jon Williams novels.. I'm scared) that keeps track of what you do and how you play and uploads the data to the manufacturing company for analysis and target marketing.
Yay. I'd love to see what they do with the data from everyone who plays as the Antichrist.
Okay. I've got to go to bed. I'll write when I get up.
I'm very much awake and about now (it's 1408 EST/EDT) so I can finally take the time to write about what's been going on.
About a month ago an information technologies company inside the beltway began courting me for a position as a systems architect. I've been keeping it under wraps the whole time, partially to keep from jinxing the entire thing (as discussing potential jobs seems to do to me time and again), and partially because nothing's set in stone until the paperwork has been recieved and signed. There is no sense, a cliche' has it, in counting one's chickens before they have hatched. Just because someone is being courted as a possible employee does not mean that it's a sure thing; you might not get the job after all.
Last Thursday evening I found the paperwork waiting in my e-mail queue, printed it out, and signed it. I then wrote my resignation from Sunrocket and went to bed, having been awake for the better part of a calendar day. I was half-afraid that I'd wake up in the morning and the whole thing would be a dream, an illusion.
The next morning it wasn't a dream.
I've already covered what happened on Friday morning so I won't belabor the point. My boss, upon reading the short letter I'd typed up the night before, asked me if there was anything that he could offer to make me stay on. Unfortunately, they can't offer me a benefits package that would make me change my mind at this point in Time, and the change in salary would be enough to let Lyssa and I live quite comfortably where we are, rather than in such a way that we have to plan purchases of over $150us in advance. The DC area is a wonderful place, but it's very expensive to live in. The price differential between the suburbs and downtown DC isn't that great, to be honest.
Word is slowly getting around at work. A few folks have already found out, and I'm sure that more will know by Monday. The ironic thing is, and I doubt that it could have been timed better, I resigned precisely one year to the day after signing on at SR.
Friday night was an interesting time: Kash, Duo, Hummingwolf, Lyssa, and I trucked out to the Arlington Brewhouse to catch a showing of Serenity, the movie that continues the now-defunct television series Firefly on the big screen. The proceeds of the showing were donated to a charity called Equality Now, which campaigns for equality of the sexes around the world.
Lyssa, Hummingwolf, and I piled into my rental car after work and headed out to Uno's just down the street to get dinner, in the form of fondue and pizza, and then returned to meet up with Kash and Duo. I grabbed my duster and we set out to find the movie theatre. As it turns out it wasn't all that far away, about a half-hour away on Route-50. It was trickier to find the right exit but made it there without any real trouble. Finding a parking space proved to be a more difficult task becuase the parking lots in a one-block radius were all taken up.
The Arlington Drafthouse is a movie theatre very much like the old Beehive in Pittsburgh - it's big and cozy inside, with tables and easy chairs at the back where you can sit, eat, drink, and generally have a good time. The theatre was packed with browncoats, though only a few cosplayer were about: A Kaylee or two, a couple interpretations of Mal (including one female), a Wash or two, but that was about itSerenity, the movie that continues the now-defunct television series Firefly on the big screen. The proceeds of the showing were donated to a charity called Equality Now, which campaigns for equality of the sexes around the world.
Lyssa, Hummingwolf, and I piled into my rental car after work and headed out to Uno's just down the street to get dinner, in the form of fondue and pizza, and then returned to meet up with Kash and Duo. I grabbed my duster and we set out to find the movie theatre. As it turns out it wasn't all that far away, about a half-hour away on Route-50. It was trickier to find the right exit but made it there without any real trouble. Finding a parking space proved to be a more difficult task becuase the parking lots in a one-block radius were all taken up.
The Arlington Drafthouse is a movie theatre very much like the old Beehive in Pittsburgh - it's big and cozy inside, with tables and easy chairs at the back where you can sit, eat, drink, and generally have a good time. The theatre was packed with browncoats, though only a few cosplayer were about: A Kaylee or two, a couple interpretations of Mal (including one female), a Wash or two, but that was about it. I'm not sure if it was the humidity and heat or what, but most everyone was there to eat, drink, and make merry while watching a favourite movie.
We ordered and sat back to watch the movie and relax after a long, long week. Duo was kind enough to buy me a beer to celebrate, a microbrew served with a slice of orange that was surprisingly sweet and tasty.
You've got to love browncoats - they don't drown out the movie by reciting well-known lines, but they know when to bust a gut.
We left the theatre a little after midnight on Saturday morning and after discovering that we'd somehow gone the way we needed to go and yet wound up going in the opposite direction and had to turn around in the very same parking lot that we'd turned around in earlier that night, found our way back to the apartment to crash for the night. Our guests set up shop on the floor wherever they could, and we retired for the night. I stayed up late to throw a couple of loads of laundry in, vis a vis towels and suchlike so that everyone could get a decent shower on Saturday morning.
Saturday morning brought with it a late start (around 1200 EST/EDT or so), pancakes (when Lyssa gets going in the kitchen, stay out of her way unless you're there to get a cup of coffee), and taking turns in the shower to get cleaned up. We all had a couple of errands to run that day, so Lyssa stayed behind and the rest of us piled into my rental car to roam around the stores and see what we could find. Kash bought a wireless network card to carry with him. All of us piled around Borders, as one would expect. I picked up a couple of textbooks to get up to speed for my new job, the first Ghost in the Shell novel (I haven't started to read it so I don't know if it sucks or not), and a couple of those blank sketchbooks that I love so much that Borders has on clearance. If they're not going to carry them anymore I'd like to have a few to last me for a couple of years.
Duo surprised me with a gift from himself and Lyssa: A $30us gift card to celebrate my new job. This caught me completely by surprise - no one's ever done that for me before.
Our next stop was Petsmart to get betta supplies. I couldn't help but wander around next to the fish tanks while I was there.. Petsmart is not known for taking good care of its livestock. The fish are usually sickly and the cats and dogs often require a vet's care after adoption because they're usually injured. The body count in the small fish tanks was obvious - they don't even remove the dead fish, and it's not unusual to see the other fish nibbling at them to supplement their diet. In one tank, shared by miniature crabs and fish, the bottom looked like an undersea battlefield: Fish and crabs tore at one another with abandon, and the casualties littered the gravel at the bottom. Crabs dismembered one another and attacked the more mobile fish as they could. The fish nibbled daintily at the dead crabs at the bottom of the tank when they could steal a couple of seconds to do so.
I really hate going there. Most folks I know tend to get animals from Petsmart to rescue the healthiest ones.
We then headed out to get lunch (by this time it was fast aproaching 1700) at a Chipotle franchise not too far away and returned home. Last night was also game night for the first night in one and a half months (things being things, none of us could get together in the same place at the same time, save for WtT, where we had other things on our minds), so Hasufin and Mika came over with their dicebags and collections of books.. they also game me a couple of CDs of Henry Rollins' spoken word pieces as celebratory gifts.
Nobody's ever done that for me before. Surprise me with celebrating a new job or anything like that, I mean.
I really do love my friends.
We had to do a bit of running around first, to pick up the pizza and get soda for everyone.. oh, and to throw in a load of laundry, something that badly needed to get done this week. Once that was done and over with, though, we sat down to wrap up part of a scenario that we'd started over a month ago, with a scared little girl who didn't realise what she was doing. Or what she was really capable of.
We wrapped up around 0200 EST/EDT again, as we usually do, and crawled off to bed to sleep for a couple of hours.
Everyone headed out around 1200 EST/EDT today, after a breakfast of coffee and leftover pizza from last night. Lyssa and I haven't done much since then, just recuperated and laid around reading. I've been trying to teach myself to burn video DVDs lately (mostly at the request of Heron, who missed it when the Sci-Fi channel showed the last episode of Doctor Who, season 27/1, called The Parting of the Ways.
Anyway, his Tivo didn't record it and he's trying to find a copy of it. I have one that I've been trying to convert into a video DVD, and while the video looks great, though the aspect ratio's been a little off because I've been trying various resolutions and screen sizes (hint: letterboxing does not, in fact, always look good), the real problem is that I can't get the audio track to work. I've burned quite a few coasters lately because of this.
Oh, well. The beat goes on.
It's now 2116 EST/EDT on Sunday. Lyssa and I just finished watching the latest episode of season 28/2 of Doctor Who, called Fear Her.
I won't write too much about it here, but I will say this: This is one of the few episodes that I genuinely enjoyed this season. It was well written and the plot was both moving and creepy as all hell.
The BBC really spoiled the season finale with the trailer, though. Thanks a lot, guys.
A former officer for the US Central Intelligence Agency claims that data from informants marked as suprious or inaccurate was used anyway as justification for military operations in Iraq.
Word's gotten out that Robert Anton Wilson, co-author of The Illuminatus Trilogy and too many books to list, is on his deathbed in a hospice.
Whatever happens will happen, Mr. Wilson. We will all miss you terribly.
So, I've had a very interesting morning, as they go.
Regular readers are no doubt aware of the minor wreck I was in a week or two ago en route to Reagan International Airport to pick up Bladeless Axe. I've been setting up things with my insurance company and the local car dealership to get my car fixed this week. I got the go-ahead and cheque from the insurance company, set up an appointment with the dealership's body shop, and reserved a car with Enterprise Rent-A-Car for transportation in the week-to-ten days the TARDIS will be in the shop. I figured that everything was a 'go'.
Well, things are never that simple. First, I must mention the thunderstorm that hit the DC metropolitan area late last night, which also incidentally knocked out the alarm clock around 0100 EST/EDT today. This is important, as will soon be made clear.
I dropped the TARDIS off and waited for the Enterprise rep to pick me up and drive me back to the lot to get my rental car. I realised something was up when the rep mentioned that the storm last night had knocked everything out at the office, so there would probably be a wait..
The wait turned into an hour because everything had been knocked out. My credit card couldn't be verified, nor could my reservation be pulled up because their computer network was offline. Their phones were ringing off the hook, even when picked up, because the PABX had crashed. During the small talk that ensued as the rep I was dealing with hunted down the necessary forms to set things in motion, it came up that I'm a system admin.
"Hey, maybe you could help us out," he joked.
So I rolled my sleeves up, set my backpack down, and jumped into the fray. Their terminals are pretty standard Pentium-II based thin clients that make a connection to a server somewhere else - they kept displaying error messages to the effect of "Cannot connect to server".
They lead me back to the wiring closet, where I took a quick look at their setup. They've got a relatively modern PABX system, a network router and link (probably a T-1, for the number of phone lines they've got on the PSTN), a few punchdowns for internal phones and networks, and a modem. The modem, upon examination, had no indicator lights active, was still turned on, and was almost uncomfortably hot to the touch.
Not a good sign.
I picked up the modem and sniffed at it, and was greeted with the mingled odors of burned resin, semiconductors, and solder. The magick smoke got out, probably due to a power surge late last night. As the modem died, it probably kicked the PABX in a tender place and it fell over, which would explain the phones ringing constantly and lack of connectivity in either direction. I disconnected the dead modem and informed the staff that they'd have to get a new one, and that they could do so by taking it down to Circuit City, Officemax, or the like (all of which are about a block away) and buy a new one. For grins, I popped the modem open with my multitool to examine it, and lo and behold found scorched circuitry just behind the RJ-11 jack that plugs into the PSTN via the wall jack.
It was a little like closing the eyes of someone who's died when I turned off the PABX. They're going to have to call their maintenance team to fix that sucker. I don't know if the PABX is okay because I didn't have the right cables to jack my laptop into it, but their modem's done for, and the router might have to undergo diagnostics just to be safe.
So, all told, I got a bigger car out of the deal and made it to work around 0930 EST/EDT. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
A Different Drum is having another overstock firesale, with a lot of good stuff going for next to nothing, like classic 80's singles remastered (A-Ha and Bananarama come immediately to mind), Count To Infinity's albums, some of the Pure Sessions limited release albums from Cosmicity, and some awesome singles from bands that you probably haven't heard of before for a song ($2us or so). Check it out and see if anything looks interesting.
Todd Durant is an awesome guy. Show him some love.. it's the only way that synthpop will continue to be available.
An interesting development in electro-medicine, of all things, was announced by the American Headache Society. Researchers studying migraine headaches have discovered that a strong magnetic pulse to the back of the head can stop or lessen migraines while they are in the early stages. The theory behind it is this: The brain works on chemo-electrical principles; electricity and magnetism are inextricably intertwined.. whenever you have one, you have the other, without fail. Migraine headaches are characterised by noticably odd flurries of electrical activity in the brain, so by that reasoning, a strong magnetic field can interrupt the electrical storm, as they call it, that heralds an oncoming migraine. Lo and behold, the electrical activity is disrupted and the migraine takes a hit. At the least, the severity of the headache (which can easily lay sufferers up for a week at a time) is greatly lessened.
Here's some lovely news for a Friday morning: Someone cracked the US Department of Agriculture network and downloaded over 26000 personnel files, including Social Security Numbers.. and file photographs. Everything you'd need to not only steal someone's identity, but make some fake government IDs.
Guess what? The US government has been secretly monitoring financial transactions as well as communications of private citizens without warrants. (registration required - Bugmenot can hook you up). Is anyone surprised anymore?
Library Director Michele Reutty is in trouble for refusing to release library records until a subpoena was served. The story goes like this: A local man threatened a child at the library, who subsequently reported it to the police. The police wanted to use the library loan records to figure out who it was because the man showed her the book he'd checked out. She wouldn't show the records until they went to the court and got a subpoena. She will probably face disciplinary action for following the laws as they are written and is facing anything from a reprimand to unpaid suspension.
Skype, in addition to being a nifty VoIP utility, also includes a text-based IM cilent, similiar to Google Chat or AIM. The version made available in China, however, censors conversations depending on a keyword dictionary. A third party makes available a Skype client in China, presumably localised for one of the major dialects of Chinese. When it's installed, though, it installs a hidden application and an encrypted dictionary file and sets to work intercepting and editing conversations. Check out the test results in the article...
Fyodor has released his survey of the top 100 network security tools for 2006. The top ten tools are, in order, Nessus (which is now closed-source), Wireshark (formerly Ethereal), Snort, the various forms of Netcat, Metasploit, Hping2, Kismet, TCPdump, Cain and Abel, and
