Pirate radio, long the province of the folks in basements and back rooms is getting some time in the press at last to discuss what the FCC's been up to.. like delaying the granting of broadcast licenses and fining the broadcasters who are trying to go legit.
Speaking of legitimacy, the peer-to-peer file sharing service Limewire is suing the RIAA on grounds of antitrust law violations due to the fact that they're hounding consumers who aren't even up to no good (go back through the archives to find some of the stuff they've done, like suing people who don't even own computers). Whether or not this is going to go anywhere remains to be seen. Lime Wire has also requested a jury trial, should this case actually make it to court.
Remember when AOL leaked all of those search terms their users were plugging in back in August? They're being used by their customers for violating not only their privacy agreement but information privacy laws in the US. It's about time that they get smacked around for violating their users' privacy in such an egregious fashion, a lot of people may have been hurt in some way because that data got out (check out Something Awful's breakdown of those results to see what I mean).
Words from the shepards of the flock?
Happy birthday, Lyssa Heartsong!
Picking up where I left off last night, everyone was up, around, and gaming once more on Sunday morning. There were just two slices of pizza left and Lara had been kind enough to put a pot of coffee on for everyone. I was trying to shake the cobwebs out while Lyssa was in the shower when I heard a loud explosion of the sort that one does not particularly want to hear inside their domicile. As it turns out, the huge jar of salsa that Lyssa and I had picked up from Whole Paycheque the day before that had been hastily placed on the top of the fridge and forgotten about had vibrated its way toward the edge of the top of the fridge and fallen to the floor when Lara opened the icebox. Net result: Shards of broken glass and a litre of salsa all over the floor, fridge, and walls.
I used some of the empty pizza boxes to scrape up as much of the salsa and glass as I could and then mopped everything else down with a Swiffer to get rid of the mess. I had to re-do the job later in the day to get the stickiness off of the floor but for the time being it sufficed.
Once I got my head together Alexius and I headed out to the local Best Buy to pick up a new charger for his Treo 650 cellphone/PDA and spent more time talking and figuring stuff out. He filled me in on his study and practise of the martial art pencak silat. More and more it intreigues me, though looking at some of the injuries he's sustained in recent weeks makes me wonder if it wouldn't injure me faster than I could regenerate the damaged structures.. still, I've been discreetly looking around for a martial art that would suit me, and it's pretty high on the list right now. We also stopped off at the bookstore to pick up Lyssa's birthday gifts, in the form of a novel that I (correctly) thought she'd like and a gift card for the bookstore.
All too soon, 'lex dropped me off back home. He was on his way back to Pittsburgh to pack some more so that he can live the city and strike out westward to see where his fortunes lie.
Once I returned, we headed back outside so that we could find Famous Dave's BBQ in Virginia for a late lunch. As it turns out it was Kyrin who was able to lead us there with little trouble, though none of us are quite certain how he managed it. We've decided that he's the missing component of my TARDIS.. the navigation system. I'm trying to talk him into leaving a lock of hair somewhere in the car in the hope that his sense of direction will rub off on my car for future use.
Lunch was tasty and fast in coming.. we had a good time hanging out, munching on barbecue, and generally relaxing after a weekend of very little sleep. After we left Famous Dave's we headed to the local Micro Center to nose around their stacks at my request, because one of my co-workers had asked me to pick up a USB flash drive for him (they have 1GB usb keys for sale for $15us each; you have to ask for them up front at the cash register, though). As it turns out, Kyrin was looking for a couple of things as well (he also bought Lyssa a set of ice blue thumbscrews for Alphonse's chassis), and Kash and Chris looked around to kill some time. Much to my surprise, everyone wound up buying one of those USB keys because the prices were so good. I feel that I should warn everyone that the Micro Center in Vienna, Virginia is probably going to get rid of its book section. When we were there they'd dismantled and removed approximately half of their bookshelves and consolidated the remaining texts in the space that remains. There isn't much that's good left on the shelves, either, so if you need anything you'd best hurry. I added a book and a stack of blank CDs to my shopping cart while I was there because I've been planning on replenishing my stocks anyway.
By the time we finally got back to the apartment we were all pretty worn out. Lyssa, with a splitting headache, went to lay down while the rest of us broke the network down and stowed everything away as needed. Kyrin headed for home, leaving Hummingwolf, Chris, Kash, and I to our devices. Everyone finally started to pack up around 2000 EST/EDT on Sunday because Lyssa and I had to go to work this morning, and so wanted some time to ourselves.
I didn't get nearly as much sleep as I wish I had, though that's mostly my fault due to the Mythbusters specials on TV last night. Lyssa, I think, had a worse time of it because she'd taken a large amount of Excedrin (which is known for its concentration of caffeine) and couldn't sleep for some part of the night, exactly how mcuh I know not.
The US government will be lifting a ban on liquids, gels, and aerosols on commercial airliners in a few weeks.
It's 2100 EST/EDT on Sunday night, and Lyssa and I are recovering from her birthday parth this weekend. Lyssa's birthday is on Monday and she wanted to celebrate with good friends by throwing a LAN party in our apartment for some of her closest friends. The game of choice this weekend was Diablo II by Blizzard Games, which we have Kash to thank for turning us on to this game, first Lyssa and then myself.
We spent Friday night cleaning up the apartment so that it would be presentable for our guests, many of whom would be spending the night with us. This didn't realy take all that long but seeing as how we've been dog tired lately, it took more out of us than it really should have. Lyssa baked a ham for everyone that night, which proved to be a problem because it seems that our slow cooker is no longer functional. The larger part of the ham had to be transferred into the oven around 0100 EST/EDT on Saturday morning to have a hope of getting done in time for everyone.
Saturday rolled around and we took care of some last minute stuff, including some last minute shopping for munchies and food for Kash. En route home we also heard from Alexius, who said that he'd be arriving late because his timetable got a little snarled. He was headed down here for a wedding in addition to the party, and the drive down here isn't an easy one if you're not familiar with the DC area.
Kyrin the Toxic Elf arrived with his computer in tow, along with a brand-new LCD flatpanel monitor which weighs considerably less than his current display. Kash, Jarin, and Chris from New Jersey also arrived. Lyssa's brother Serrin came later in the day, which meant that the party could finally start. We'd set up a full scale network in the living room with some of my spare equipment, and carefully arranged everyone so that the electrical circuits in the room wouldn't blow out once everyone's decks were booted up. I'd decided to build a scratch Windows 2000 machine to game on instead of using Leandra; in hindsight I could easily have used her, but then again I didn't know that we'd be using the local network and not battle.net. While waiting for people to arrive, we decided to kill some time by watching Army of Darkness, which Kash hadn't seen before.
For a dungeon crawling bash-'em-up game, I can't think of a better movie to watch to warm up.
All told, we managed to clear the first act of the game (about five distinct quests) and part of the second in six hours' time or so. Around 1800 or 1900 EST/EDT on Saturday we broke for dinner, having ordered pizza from Papa John's. As it turns out, their larges aren't as large as they once were, and a full house of folks (we had a number of people in attendence who weren't playing but wanted to hang out jus the same) killed those pizzas in short order. Hasufin and Mika came over, as did Butterfly and Mark, Hummingwolf, and Rialian later in the evening. Lara from Pittsburgh caught a ride down to see us and spend the night. We were even graced with a visit from Ranger Morgiah, who is still recovering from a dance practise injury about two weeks ago. We had spectators, people curled up talking, and I think a few other movies were shown while the rest of us were gaming.
Unfortunately, Laurelinde, N-, and company couldn't make it, as they're still on the shelf after Crossing the Thresholds. Duo similiarly couldn't make it, as he hurt his back at work on Friday and wasn't in shape to travel this weekend.
Somehow, Papa John's managed to mess up our order in more subtle ways: Mika, who recently had her gallbladded removed, cannot eat footd with a lot of fat in them any longer, and that includes pizza. She and Hasufin had ordered a chicken and artichoke pizza without cheese, and which had not arrived with the rest of our order. Lyssa went back to the phone and after a short time two more pizzas arrived, one of them a custom job for Hasufin and Mika.. who left at some point in the evening.
I had to bow out of the competition around 2300 EST/EDT because my wrists were bothering me too much and hung out with everyone last night.
Kyrin was in rare form this weekend, as evidenced by the updates to my .plan file. Ordinarily, I try to mix up entries so that there aren't any entries from the same source in a row, but in this case, I'll make a very not safe for work exception.
Alexius arrived around 0200 EST/EDT this morning after getting so horribly lost a couple of times that everyone at the party with access to a computer couldn't locate his position through Google Maps, Mapquest, or any other real world mapping site on the Net. More's the point, he was apparently on the beltway in a location known to all of us (even me) but quoting street signs that don't exist anywhere in Washington, DC that I'm aware of.
'lex and I wound up staying up until 0500 EST/EDT or so, well after everyone either went home or went to sleep. We had almost a year of catching up to do, and talked until just before sunrise. A lot's happened and we had a lot to talk about, and a lot to figure out.
Lyssa and I got up around 1100 EST/EDT this morning to find that the LAN party was once again in full swing. Everyone else was up and playing, and we tried to boot our brains back up.
Speaking of booting.. I'm going to bed.
Jerry Fallwell's in the news again after public remarks that Hillary Cinton running for the presidency would motivate a bigger response than the Morningstar itself running.
And people wonder why I don't trust organised religion any farther than I can throw a tractor-trailer.
Congress is going to vote on a bill that would make it legal to strip search students at any time, JUST IN CASE they're carrying drugs.
Yeah. Just in case.
2008 presidential candidate somehow made it into the newswires by saying that Al Quaida has warned all Muslims to get out of the US to get them out of the way of an attack. Whether or not this is going to hit the media at large is a different question. If anyone needs it, I've captured a copy of this article offline.
Everyone thank Sun Microsystems for opening the source code to Solaris as well as making it affordable to home users who want to play around with it ($20us so you can download the CD or DVD disk images and burn your own)... but forcing you to buy a support contract if you want to download security patches. They've even pulled the recommended patch clusters ([0-9{2}]_Recommended.zip) from their FTP site.
Even when you're dying, you're a source of revenue. This marks a scary trend in health care, I think - people are choosing to die (usually not painlessly) rather than pay exorbitant sums of money for treatments that might prolong their lives a little. This is a shame because quite a few impressive treatments for cancer (that were announced as being the cutting edge in the journals back in the late 1980's and early 1990's) are so bloody expensive.
Read the article and think about it for a while. Then think about how healthy you are.
Somebody call Richard C. Hoagland - the best images of the Cydonia region of Mars to date are in, and the 'deliberately constructed face on Mars' hypothesis just got broadsided by a can of soda moving at a noticable fraction of C. Not that this will stop a man whose grasp of mathematics is even worse than mine...
It's come out that a number of tech manufacturers are fighting network neutrality bills passing through the US government at this time. Companies like Motorola and Tyco are pressuring the Senate to pass the communications bill that would make it legal for the owners of the backbone lines that comprise the bulk of the Internet to restrict traffic passing through their equipment based upon how much you're willing to pay them. The bill's been stuck in the Senate for months now because the bill would do away with network neutrality as we know it, and many other large companies, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google among them, have been pressuring the Senate to let this bill die.
From the release notes of Windows Media Player 11 from Microsoft: You can't back up your DRM licenses anymore, and neither can you copy music you bought off the Net to another of your computers. If you have to rebuild your system for whatever reason and you backed up your audio files, you will either have to fight with the company you bought that music from to give you a new license key, or you're SOL because you can't back up your license key files.
Professor Stephen Hawking was once told at a symposium held by the Vatican that he should not investigate the origins of our universe because it tresspassed upon the knowledge of God by the late Pope John Paul II.
Coming in 2007: Spaceballs: The Animated Series!
Googling for the repair manuals of ATMs in Virginia helped someone reprogram one to dispense a $20us bill for every $5us bill that would be necessary to fulfill a withdrawl.
Here's an interesting way to keep your stuff from getting stolen during handling at the airport, courtesy of Bruce Schneier.
It seems that international incidents aren't just the domain of the United
States. Case in point: Hugo Chavez, president of the country of Venezuela
The Commonwealth Fund Commission released a report today that gives the United States a D for health care when compared to other countries. The reasons for such poor marks included the fact that 115 out of every 100k Americans dies of easily preventable diseases, there is an infant mortality rate of 0.007%, and that roughly half of all adults in the US get regular preventive checkups.
On one hand, the heathcare system in the US is a racket. There's no two ways about it, from getting charged for medications that you might need while in the hospital but never actually get to new mothers being discharged less than a day after giving birth (as just happened to an old friend of mine). Don't get me started on the cost of insurance in this country.. but on the other hand this article, at least from how it was written, comes across as trying to slag the US without giving any hard facts. I can't really say that you can trust the information in this article, in good conscience, without seeing the data they used to draw those conclusions.
Here's a nifty idea: Batteries that you can plug into a USB port to recharge.
Make your own demotivational poster.
Data transmission could get just a little bit faster thanks to advances in laser technology, namely, lasers that fit on silicon chips even smaller than the big laser tubes people usually think of, or the laser LEDs that have been in use in long-distance data transmission equipment for years now. Intel has come up with a process to make coherent light emitters small enough that they could, at some time in the future when the technology becomes affordable, be used for communication with computer peripherals, and perhaps even replace conductive wires that make up circuitry today. Light moves faster than electrical impulses because light isn't covered by Ohm's Law, which governs the flow of current through a conductive substance (which implies resistance, unless you are talking about supercooled superconductors).
The US Republican party is arguing over the latest anti-terror bill while the Democrats watch from the sidelines. Midterm elections in
Congress are coming up and nobody involved wants to look like an enemy
combatant they're not helping in the war on terror. Representative
Heather Wilson wrote a bill that makes it permissible to wiretap without a
warrant if an attack is believed imminant, which seems to be just about every
three calendar weeks or so. The debate over exactly how to get information out
of the detainees is still going because of those pesky Geneva Conventions. At least the details of the
wiretaps they put into place would have to be shared with the House and Senate
if this bill passed.
Interesting factoid for you: Pennsylvania state law requires healthcare workers to draw blood from a patient if the police demand it for testing.
Alberto Gonzalez, Attorney General for the United States is playing the child porn card again for a bill that would require all ISPs to keep logs of their customers' net.activity. Of course, no one who's a good, upstanding citizen would oppose child pornography.. which is exactly why he said it. I've already ranted about this, so I'll get right to the bits about monitoring several hundred thousand to a few million people just in case something shady is going on. He's also calling the government's lack of access to information a hinderance to prosecuting child pornographers.
Okay. Great. Why is he suddenly harping on this when people are writing to the US government in droves telling them that they're turning into Big Brother? I don't believe in coincidences, and he's taking a hell of a lot of flak right now over his policies which are bordering on building the Panopticon.
No matter where you go, no matter what you do on the Net, even if you're just checking your Hotmail account to see if your grandchildren have sent you pictures from their birthday party someone would be watching you.
1984 was a warning to the civilised people of the world, not a how-to guide.
Little kids drowning worms might be the next terrorist combatants.. actually, I'm kidding. It is said that in many large cities the water supplies are being monitored by panfish. No, seriously. Common panfish such as bluegills and pumpkinseeds are very sensitive to chemicals in their environment, so they are kept in running water from the water supplies under close watch. If anything happens to the fish, then the water is contaminated and Something Bad(tm) has happened. Unfortunately, they can only detect chemical contaminants and not biological contaminants, but any information is better than no information in a monitoring situation, assuming that you can correctly interpret what you're looking at.
In news across the pond, all hell's breaking loose in Hungary right now as the prime minister has admitted to manipulating the public through the media to win the election in April of 2006. The article contains excerpts from the translated speech, where the PM freely admits to going to considerable lengths to conceal the deception from the public.
I know that I've got a couple of readers in Hungary right now - what's the situation like? I'd like to post it here if I could.
In medical news, research shows that the death rate of people infected with HIV has gone down. This isn't exactly good news, because the people in question who died actually died of other causes, i.e., diseases not related to AIDS, such as cancer or substance abuse. This fluctuation in the statistics is credited to advances in antiviral and anti-HIV drugs in the past twelve years.
From the it's-about-flipping-time department of Reuters comes this piece from India: The Minister of Health is banning underweight models from the runways of India because they're influencing young girls to become anorexic or bulemic in an attempt to fit into the catagories the media considers attractive. More and more girls are being diagnosed as malnourished or ostoporotic because they think that you have to be a size 2 (whatever the hell that means where you live because the standards vary so much) to be pretty.
Let me go on the record commending Anbumani Ramadoss for this decision. Get this through their heads, and then do some social engineering to make it stick.
Let me be blunt here, folks - pretty is sure as the day is long not limited to girls so thin that you could floss your teeth with them. It's healthy to have body fat. It exists to regulate your body temperature, act as a reserve of nutrients so that your body will function normally, and pad your internal organs so that you won't rupture something if you walk into a doorknob. For men, body fat also accentuates your musculature. For women, body fat (and I'm deliberately using the word 'fat' to try to jar some sense into some people Out There) gives you something called 'curves', which men traditionally find sexy.
I'm going to cut myself off here because I'm about to launch into a rant that probably won't be productive. Instead, I'm going to post hyperlinks to a pair of Google searches, one for anorexia and one for bulemia, in which you can learn about all of the health problems the quest for being dangerously thin will set you up for.
The troubles never seem to end for Diebold.. someone figured out that you can unlock the chassis of their e-voting machines with a key freely available on the Net.
Vampyra Daisy gave birth yesterday to a nine-pound little one named Kestin.
A few days ago I got a letter in the mail from my folks in Pittsburgh. As it turns out, my ten-year high school reunion is coming up in about two months' time, and I have yet to decide if I actually want to pay the $60us for a ticket to go.
Suffice it to say that there is little love lost between myself and my old high school. It was said during my four-year tenure at that facility that there were no social problems that couldn't be solved with a five-megatonne nuclear device. That can become a self-fulfilling prophecy when you have it drummed into your head day in and day out since seventh grade that you are a part of the worst graduating class in the history of the district.
I'm toying with going to the reunion just to mess with people. Of the ten people (more or less) who actually spoke to me, let alone counted me as a friend (and I them), nine remain. In the fall of 1996 while I was at IUP, I recieved an e-mail from Steve S- who informed me that Bipin, another high school pal, was found dead in a hotel room just up the highway from my folks' house. I never found out anything else, though it's well within my power to do so.
Those few buds aside, whom I spent many a happy hour bringing about a New World Order with, I barely remember any of them, let alone spoke to them. It's been nearly a decade since I even opened up the yearbook of my senior year to read the "Have a nice life" messages that a few people left. Maybe a few were sincere. I don't know.
Permaculture techniques make a desert aerable. Fascinating! Fans of the works of Frank Herbert will no doubt take notice.
Hacktivismo, a division of the Cult ov thee Dead C0w, has just released Torpark, a version of the Mozilla Firefox web browser that can be installed on a USB key. It does not have to be installed on a PC, and it leaves absolutely no traces of its presence or any browser logs on the system you're browsing from. It uses TOR to make your browsing completely anonymous. It can be downloaded from here.
Whomever came up with this commercial knows exactly what moving is like!
It's finally over and done with - my paperwork is handed in at last. Now's a waiting game...
This weekend recently past was taken as slowly as we could manage it.. Lyssa and I wound up going back to Lush in Georgetown on Saturday to nose around a bit at all the nifty bath stuff they sell.. while their products are excellent, the store as a whole has a way of overloading your sense of smell, so spending too much time in there makes your visit an academic one after about an hour. Still, if you're into small-batch bath-seltzer bombs, soaps, shampoos, and massage bars, Lush is the place to go.
Because Lyssa's birthday is coming up soon I got her a gift certificate for Lush, which she happily used on a large number of bath bombs and soaps. I have not yet tried any of them (because I'd prefer to enjoy them properly and not waste them at 0-dark-30 when my brain is still booting up), but she's quite taken with them.
Think you can just buy a region-free DVD player from Amazon or bring one back with you? Wait until RFID-enabled DVDs show up on the market. The MPAA is pushing for DVD players that will read RFID chips in DVD disks and if the region doesn't match the one it expects, it'll refuse to play.
Next up: DVD-ROM drives that come with DVD playback software... in damn near every home electronics store on the planet.
In Great Britain, not only can Big Brother watch you but now he can shout at you, too. Seven of the new securicams deployed in Middlesbrough now include loudspeakers so that the faceless watchers on the other end of the co-ax cable can send warnings or add colour commentary to whatever it is that they're watching.
No word yet on when cameras will be fitted into televisions across the pond.
In response to Pope Benedict the XVI's statement on Islam and the jyhad, a militant Islamic group has pulled out the stops and declared jihad on the pontiff. One Sheikh Abubukar Hassan Malin has declared that the Pope is to be hunted down.
People just don't get it. Violence only begets violence. It doesn't solve anything, it just stops it for a while. Then, once everyone who 'needs' to be stomped has been, the search for someone new to thrash begins...
I know it's asking too much as well as being too idealistic for this world, but both parties are in the wrong. The collective hands of the Catholic Church are just as stained with blood as the collective hands of many Islamic sects. Cases in point: The Inquisition and the Crusades. None of these groups want to see eye to eye, let alone come to some sort of compromise, or - horror of horrors - apologise to one another.
So, this weekend was kind of slow up until Saturday night, when Jarin and Hummingwolf came over for dinner. After Lyssa and I got home from Georgetown we picked up a little around the apartment and made sure that dinner, made in the slow cooker, was done. Chicken thighs in a light cranberry sauce, cornbread stuffing, and mixed vegetables were on the menu, and we wound up running to Whole Paycheque for dessert, which took the form of multiple bricks of gingerbread and freshly whipped cream on ice. Jarin picked up a sixpack of pumpkin spice ale, which wasn't too bad once chilled, though I'm not sure it's a favourite yet. Lyssa and Hummingwolf weren't very impressed with said ale, and it left me with a slight headache the next morning which I feared would turn into a full-blown hangover (it didn't).
We sat up until late that night talking and watching Adult Swim on Cartoon Network to relax. I think everyone left for home around 0100 EST/EDT on Sunday by way of the Metro.
In a turn of events not seen since the late 1980's, an indie goth band called the Cruxshadows has taken the Billboard Dance Singles chart by storm with the single Sophia from their new album due out in October of 2006. Sophia also claimed the number seven slot on the Billboard Single Sales chart this week. You can check out the chart for this week here.
Lyssa bought the single from iTunes last night - even if goth music isn't your cup of tea, buy a copy of the .mp3 (it'll run you $1us) and give it a listen. It isn't often that you hear intelligent lyrics anymore.. or lyrics that happen to be clued-in.
There is now an official petition to give planet Eris an astrological symbol, and they're gunning for the Five-Fingered Hand of Eris. Sign on and help us out.
Last Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved a bill that gives more legal rights to detainees in the War On Terror(tm). If nothing else, hopefully it'll mitigate retalitory attacks in the future.
In other words, Asahara Shoko, leader of the Japanese sect Aum Shinrikyo, which was behind a chemical attack in the Tokyo subway system in 1995, was denied his appeal on Friday. Asahara has been in a detention facility since his conviction for planning the attack in 1995, as well as directing the capture, execution, and disposal of the sect's various enemies over the years with industrial microwave ovens. For more information on capital punishment in Japan, check this out.
Yet another example of science fiction predicting the future rears its ugly head. A new software package in China is being used to sentence prisoners in the province of Shangdong. The crimes the programme is used to handle include robbery, rape, and breaches of state security.
As if the utter lack of security of the Diebold electronic voting machines hasn't yet been beaten past death into thin-pasty-substancehood, someone's figured out how to write a virus that can make arbitrary changes to voting records. Remember, even if theseunits has antivirus software installed, they still can't detect entirely novel viruses on their own..
Not only is an Evangelion theatrical movie in the works, but Gainax is planning on remaking the series as a sequence of four feature films.
More on the war on science.
License plate of the week: TEH VTEC
At last, it's done. I hope.
It's been raining in DC since late last night, though it hasn't been cold or windy. If it hasn't been raining it's been misty outside. On the whole, not too bad, or so it feels to me. It's not too bright so it's rather comfortable outside.
This should be of interest to some people - the Chinese government isn't just restricting information flowing out of Chinese data nets, they're restricting what can come in, now, too. The Xinhua News Agency has the responsibility of regulating the flow of news-related data now. They now state that they will block any news that violates the basic principles in the Constitution of the People's Republic of China (if the government is in sole control, how is it the People's republic?), undermines the unity of the Chinese people, endangers the national security of China, and a host of other things. If anyone wants to subscribe to news from other countries, they have to sign up with Xinhua, which will pull news by proxy for them ("All the news we think you should know").
Information is indeed a valuable commodity, though... just ask the US Senate, which approved the warrantless wiretapping program in return for accountability.. in the form of a secret court, the proceedings of which mere mortals like you and I will probably never have access to.
Remember those articles about microwave-based antipersonnel weapons last summer? The US Air Force wants to start testing them on American citizens for the purposes of crowd control. First we've got "free speech zones" which are anything but, because they take everyone with something to say and fence them off a few miles away from the site, and now this...
In Germany a number of TOR exit nodes were taken offline and confiscated. TOR, a proxy system for anonymous net.access, is a massively decentralised system that can make your connection attempts appear to be coming out of somewhere else, be it in the next state or from the other side of the world. The German police state that child porn was seen crossing into or out of those nodes and they've seized them to analyse the logs to determine who was behind it and where they were from. There are just two problems with this: One, by default TOR doesn't keep usable logs (that's the point of anonymity), and two, the only thing they could do was figure out the next hop back from the TOR exit node, so the 'where' can't be determined, either. It's been reported that the German police are well aware of this. So far, no charges have been filed.
Now, here's the thing.. child porn is bad. Let me reiterate that: Bad. Not only does it steal the innocence from the world's most precious natural resource (i.e., children), but it's exploitative and emotionally damaging. In fact, you have to wonder who in the hell thought this up and why, but that's beside my point. My point is this: Child pornography as a topic is also being used as justification for cutting away the rights of many people around the world. Some of the more lucid denizens of the Net are calling it one of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse (along with Crackers, Spam, and Terrorism).
You have to admit, it's the perfect buzzword for an opportunist to get his or her way with nary anyone blinking.
TOR can also be used for many other purposes (and often is), such as research into topics that one doesn't want getting around (the US Navy uses it to gather intelligence, seeing as how it was originally their project, and it wouldn't surprise me in the least that other intelligence agencies around the world were making use of it as well), blowing the whistle on illegal activities of many kinds, and for just protecting one's privacy on the Net. It isn't right to demonise a tool that can be used to protect as well as harm; a wrench is a tool that can be used to harm someone (when used as a weapon or in the sabotage of a machine of some kind, like a car) as well as help someone (they're great for repairing things, I'm told). Same with a gun. The argument that "if you're not up to no good, you have nothing to hide" doesn't wash, because desiring privacy doesn't mean you're up to no good. That argument assumes that everything that everyone does must be available for scrutiny at all times to anyone; people using such an argument often silently exempt themselves. There are many other refutations to the argument, some good, some bad, some ugly, but what it boils down to is this: If you're really not up to anything shady, then why is everyone so damned interested in what everyone else does behind closed doors? Why do governments keep so many thousands (globally speaking, millions) of files that are labelled Classified, Secret, and Top Secret, that only a few hundred people on the face of this planet are even aware of the existence of? I'd call those pretty private. Why doesn't everyone record themselves having sex and post them on their websites (a few hundred folks on Pornotube do not constitute a majority - and for the gods' sake, don't click on that link from work!)? Why am I (or you, for that matter) not allowed to grab some schmuck off the street and copy down their name, address, phone numbers, driver's license number, Selective Service Registration number, Social Security number, and take a few photographs while we're at it? More's the point, why could we not then do the exact same things to the folks in power? If they're US citizens, and US citizens can be monitored without a warrant or probable cause, what makes them so special that they're exempt? That's a double standard.
Ever wondered if an airport you'll be flying to has decent wireless access? Now you can check first on this list.
In other news, Google does banned books.
Remember when Pluto was demoted from the status of planet? They've named the heavenly body that bumped it.
Wait for it...
Yeah, that Eris.
Busy busy busy.
Long afternoon yesterday. More on that later.
Bringing a sword to a gunfight is never, ever a smart idea.
One of these days, I'm going to have time to actually sit down and write about everything that's been going on.. the world's been busy lately, as busy as I've been, and there's so much to say.
Some days it's downright frustrating.
So here's what's been going on lately: Work itself hasn't been too taxing lately, save for the fact that I think I've killed a single redwood tree's worth of forms, everything from health insurance to work history to... you get the picture. In a world in which moving gigabytes of information in a few minutes's time (no, not by putting a couple of DVDs in your pocket and getting in the car) is commonplace, one would think that getting the necessary information would be trivial, given access to the right databases and a couple of elementary queries. Things aren't that simple. First off, under certain circumstances the answers a given person gives have to be double-checked, confirmed, and cross-referenced. That means getting the answers in the first place, and that means paperwork. Second, it's a way of confirming that the work was in fact done and that someone signed off on it, even if only to say, "Yeah, it crossed my desk."
Sometimes, tracking down those answers just so you can fill them out can take hours and hours of poring over old documents (so much for the paperless office) or poking through web archives of bank transactions and payments. Amazingly, not everyone makes your entire history available, so you can't go back to, say, 2005 and see how you finished up, you have to go through your own records to accomplish such a feat.
As fate would have it for many people, the day you organise everything is the same day that you start losing everything. It was easier to dig through a pile of envelopes than it was to go through a filing cabinet. My files make too much sense, that's the problem. My mental search heuristics and my logical filing system aren't compatible, so flipping through the filing cabinet is an exercise in futility.
Some days, though, life throws you a curve ball to make up for it.
I chanced to leave work early yesterday (due to my habit of not taking a lunch break) and got on the Metro to head for home. I made it to the subway platform some period of time after the train had already gotten there, so I rushed to get into the car and head for home. I didn't stop to check which train I was getting on.
As luck would have it, I didn't realise that anything was amiss until the train stopped at a stop, and then started going backward. I'd hit the end of the line. The wrong Metrorail line.
Total elapsed time: Forty-five minutes.
It was somewhen around that moment that a little switch deep inside my wetware flipped, and suddenly things didn't matter quite so much. I didn't care that I'd gone an unknown number of miles in the wrong bloody direction, well out past the Pentagon. I had one of those moments of being in the moment and enjoying it as fully as I was capable of regardless of where I was and where I happened to be going.
No worry. No stress. No "Where in the hell am I?" Just, "Okay, I've got nine stops to go before I get to the switchoff, then I get off, go downstairs, and get on the right train, headed for home. I'm going to read my book some more."
And this I did for the rest of the trip home, all... however long it took. Even my normally relaxed attitude toward Time evaporated. I knew where I had to be. I'd get there when I got there, and not a moment sooner.
That was the first time that I'd gotten mixed up and found myself someplace strange and enjoyed it.
It was one of those moments where a part of me recorded each and every second in exacting detail, in the hopes that I'll be able to replicate that exact mental configuration in the future entirely at will.
Note to self: Start taking more time to work on that.
After I got home, Lyssa and I found ourselves stricken by wanderlust, and made a few phone calls. We eventually lined up dinner with Laurelinde, N-, and company in Maryland for no other reason than it seemed like fun. So, to that end, we jumped into the TARDIS and set off for Maryland, with Lyssa knitting in the passenger's seat and myself with the windows down singing Iris songs because it seemed like a fun thing to do.
It's a shame that the beltway drowns out so much sound. I wish I'd been able to get a few more folks hooked on Iris yesterday.
We wound up at Tiffin's in College Park for a late dinner of Indian food, and eventually parted ways around 2200 EST/EDT because both of us have to get up pretty early in the morning to make it to work.
Note to self: Find ways of doing a little more in the evening so that I don't have to rush around in the mornings to make it to the Metro station on time.
Note to self: Figure out exactly how much of a window I have to work with.
I feel so much better, now.. I've been wanting to sit and write for a while but various circumstances have been preventing me from doing so. At least it's kept me from getting too worked up over stuff like dumbasses killing stingrays in the name of Steve Irwin, who would be chagrined to hear of this. He'd be even more puzzled to find that PETA has been posthumously attacking him in the news.
Leave it to PETA to kick people when they're down dead. The
dead can't defend themselves, after all.
This is the sort of thing that blows me away: A $20kus MP3 player. Yep, that's right.. it's plated with gold and studded with one karat diamonds. And it's only 1 GB in size. I suppose when you have far too much money to know what to do with it all (like buy an iPod that has several dozen times the storage capacity) and you really have nothing to worry about on a month-to-month basis (like those pesky bills) there's only one direction you can go: Absurdly expensive.
Did anyone else see the K-9 units patrolling the subway platforms in DC, Virginia, and probably Maryland? Two police with dogs (I'd guess they were bomb-sniffing dogs, judging by today's date) were on patrol in the Dunn-Loring Metro station this afternoon.
Just when you think that medical science has everything figured out, something comes along to shake up the snow-globe again. Patients who are in a persistent vegetative state, who for all intents and purposes are cases of "the lights are on but no one's home" actually might be capable of coherent thought even though they are all but unresponsive to the outside world. Experiments carried out in Cambridge are showing brain activity consistent with that of a person who isn't in a PVS... the experiment consisted of asking patients in a PVS to imagine themselves doing something, such as playing tennis while their brain activity was being monitored through application of functional magnetic resonance imaging hardware. This showed the patterns of chemoelectrical activity in the brain that were involved during this time. Then they repeated the process with test subjects who were defined for the purposes of the experiment as neurologically sound.
There wasn't much of a difference between the results from the two test groups, save for natural variation.
Is it possible that people in a PVS are conscious (they usually have some of the usual reflexes, such as breathing and swallowing and they definitly show a more or less normal sleep cycle), just not able to communicate with the outside world? Good question.
Is it possible that the brain activity comes from automatic processing of heard natural langauge, completely decoupled from higher levels of consciousness? Yes, it actually it possible. Medical science is still trying to figure out how people can survive (just barely) under conditions of little to no sleep for extended periods of time (though death results after a certain point, usually about two weeks) by taking micro-naps of a second or so, let alone states of coma or PVS. The reason I mention this is because the EEG of a person who's been awake for a couple of days shows cycles of electrical activity consistent with sleep and wakefulness, as with anyone.. even though the person never really went to sleep. Sure, there are differences (such as periodic bursts of delta waves) but the overall cycle doesn't do what you'd think it would.
The brain's an amazingly complex and weird thing.
Speaking of.. some research I did for that last entry I wrote showed me an intersting fact: Sleep deprivation interferes with the operation of the human forebrain, and can cause one's writing skills to go right ou the proverbial window. I've not really been able to write for a few days now, up until this weekend past. No, I haven't been getting much sleep lately, why do you ask?
Ordinarily, I'm not much of a fan of fanfic, but I've heard good things from the podcast The Signal about this series called Firefly: Virtual Season Two. I remember the fourth virtual season of Forever Knight and that wasn't too bad...
Time will tell, as it does with all things. Especially today.
So it's 9/11... five years ago, two airliners crashed into the Twin Towers in New York City, a third hit the Pentagon, and a fourth went down over the sticks of Pennsylvania - the famous flight 93.
I don't think I'll ever be able to forget what happened on that day. I was still in Pennsylvania working at Medebiz in Pittsburgh as the system admin. The network at work was at a crawl from the time I got into the office around 0805 EST/EDT that morning, and I started trying to figure out why.
It was because everyone and their back up at the office was listening to one of a half-dozen RealAudio or RealVideo feeds of live news from New York City. It was about a half-hour later that I finally heard someone in another part of the cube gulag whisper, "A plane hit one of the towers!"
Holy shit. Those were the exact words that went through my mind at that second.
Right back to my workstation, right to CNN and the BBC, and brain-first into the Crystal Chantry (requisat en pace).
Everyone accounted for? Mostly. A few avatars were missing in action, I found out later because the college campuses had gone into lockdown, along with most of the city. All of us were surfing the newsfeeds and commnets for news coming out of New York City, because all of us had either family or friends who lived there.
It was on the CNN newsfeed, which had been lagged to hell and back again, that I saw the second plane hit. Throughout the office, I heard cellphones ring as members of the US National Guard were contacted, followed by profanities that I had never heard those individuals utter before (and not since) and the pounding of feet as they raced for the doors, their cars, and active duty. I packed up my gear, shut down my workstation, and raced for home to make sure that my grandfather was all right.
The highway that ran past the industrial park the building was a part of was empty, as were the streets of my hometown.
My grandfather was all right, thank the gods. I raced back to my lab and jacked back in after turning the television on to CNN. The television tuner card in Leandra was set to another news network, along with several RealVideo streams to other news sites, IRC, and the Crystal Chantry, where a council had been hastily convened. I also turned on my police scanner and my two-meter shortwave receiver. We worked feverishly throughout the day tracing as many people that we knew but couldn't reach as we could, relaying news from network to network, and sending out confirmations and denials of rumours from every last corner of the Net that we could reach.
The news rattled on minute after minute, hour after hour... I wondered each moment in the back of my mind if the folks that I couldn't find were all right. Not a few of them were in New York City, if not living there than working there. The sad thing is, I didn't know any real names, just handles... I ran into a few of them at HOPE the next summer, but some are still missing in action. The telephone network in many sectors was collapsing under the weight of the calls people were frantically placing.
In the year 1975 CE, the PSTN was designed to handle calls from something like 10% of the population of the United States simultaneously. Nobody's really sure of the capacity of the PSTN these days, especially when you factor in the prevalence of VoIP and cellular telephones (a customer of a given cell service calling another customer of the same cell service never touches the PSTN, the call goes over said company's private telephone networks). What I do know is that I wasn't able to reach anyone over my landline or via my cellphone. The Net as a whole slowed to a crawl as untold thousands of people hit news sites, newsfeeds, websites, sent e-mails, and slammed search engines with up-to-the-second queries. Ultimately, face-to-face was the best way to communicate that fateful day.
A few of the folks we'd been looking for had been pressed into duty at the college they attended - as senior students as well as RA's (resident assistants) they were tasked with rounding up everyone on their floor and moving them into areas deemed safe by the college administration, taking head counts, and doing the best that they could to keep everyone calm.
Later that day, well after flight 93 went down and the impact at the Pentagon, I set out across the city of Pittsburgh to check on everyone at the college on the southwestern side of Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh was a ghost town. Utterly empty. Even the police had cleared out. Nobody walked the streets - even the homeless had gone to ground.
The echoes that day were heard around the globe. They weren't the sounds of dozens screaming in fear as they died. They weren't the reverberations of explosions or buildings collapsing.
Those echoes were the sound of everything changing.
Dick Chaney says that Iraq would have been invaded even if there was no risk of Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction. How reassurring.
Today started off okay and got rocky fast. Lyssa and I finally got up around 1030 EST/EDT this morning and had a leisurely breakfast of biscuits and turkey bacon. In hindsight, smaller frying pans work better than the large ones for bacon, but that's not that big a deal.. I had to go to the bank to finish getting my accounts straightened out after a screwup some years ago that never really caused problems, save when trying to do important things (like set up direct deposit of paycheques). The last time I was in Pittsburgh I spoke to my folks about getting this fixed from their end, because they live near the branch of the bank that I originally did all of the paperwork through, and the wheels started turning.
I was told that there was one last piece of paperwork that I had to take care of from DC, so I set out to finalise everything this morning.
Seems simple in principle, doesn't it?
Yeah. Right.
First off, the guy I was dealing with did his best.. he really did. Unfortunately, his English wasn't very good and I'm not all that good with accents, so it took quite a bit longer than it really should have. I have to give the guy respect as well as thanks.. unfortunately it took quite a while for each of us to figure out what the other was saying, and longer for him to call back to the core office on the eastern seaboard and get.. you know, I don't know what he was trying to do or what information he was trying to get hold of. He did more listening than talking.
Dick Chaney says that Iraq would have been invaded even if there was no risk of Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction. How reassurring.
Today started off okay and got rocky fast. Lyssa and I finally got up around 1030 EST/EDT this morning and had a leisurely breakfast of biscuits and turkey bacon. In hindsight, smaller frying pans work better than the large ones for bacon, but that's not that big a deal.. I had to go to the bank to finish getting my accounts straightened out after a screwup some years ago that never really caused problems, save when trying to do important things (like set up direct deposit of paycheques). The last time I was in Pittsburgh I spoke to my folks about getting this fixed from their end, because they live near the branch of the bank that I originally did all of the paperwork through, and the wheels started turning.
I was told that there was one last piece of paperwork that I had to take care of from DC, so I set out to finalise everything this morning.
Seems simple in principle, doesn't it?
Yeah. Right.
First off, the guy I was dealing with did his best.. he really did. Unfortunately, his English wasn't very good and I'm not all that good with accents, so it took quite a bit longer than it really should have. I have to give the guy respect as well as thanks.. unfortunately it took quite a while for each of us to figure out what the other was saying, and longer for him to call back to the core office on the eastern seaboard and get.. you know, I don't know what he was trying to do or what information he was trying to get hold of. He did more listening than talking.
As it turns out, I had to write a letter, addressed to the branch down here, stating what I needed and why. If I'd known before I left Pittsburgh, things would have been done ahead of time, but as it was I had to head home, write a quick letter, and then make another trip to drop it off.
The rest of the day was spent up to my neck in paperwork: Finding answers, calling people, sending e-mails, searching websites, and rechecking the data I've already found. Not fun.
Deadline: Monday. Even less fun.
Interesting, indeed.
I knocked off around 1800 EST/EDT today and did some last minute shopping for dinner. For the second time this week, Lyssa and I attempted to make meatloaf; this time we bought meatloaf mix (beef, pork, and veal) and made sure to spice the meat normally. Unfortunately, meatloaf mix is hellishly greasy. It took twice as long to bake as meatloaf normally does, and we had to drain it a couple of times before it was really edible. The slices of bread that the baking pan was lined with all but vanished in the grease, as they were reduced to a thin paste.
In the end it wasn't too bad, though it was a learning experience.
My writing's been pretty scatterbrained lately, I have to admit. I've got a lot on my mind that has a higher processing priority than other things right now. I don't have much time to haunt the newswires right now, and I might not for the forseeable future.
Yeah, it's one of those "new job in a secure facility" gigs.
There's also not wanting to really look at a computer in the evenings after I get home, partially because I'm wiped out from work, and partially because I've been feeling twinges in my wrists again, and I'm trying to take care of them.
The whole 'tired' thing is a big part of it.
Lately, I've been playing Diablo II in the evenings to unwind. It plays very well under Wine for Linux, and I've been having a good time just messing around with the game. It seems that my favourite strategy of "take everything that isn't nailed down" doesn't seem to work very well because your character has a limited amount of space in the inventory, but that doesn't stop me from selling off everything that I possibly can...
Yeah, it's one of those games. It isn't a first-person shooter, a genre which I am not terribly fond of to begin with. It's an adventure game, three-quarters view, with a very easy user interface.
It's even got a good mapping system, so folks lke me who don't have a sense of direction can enjoy it.
So I'm watching Eureka Seven on Adult Swim on a weekend. So much of this is taken from Evangelion it isn't even funny....
Maybe I'm just getting cranky in my old age.
I've made it through my first week at the office. The actual, real office in downtown DC, with cubicles and everything.
I'm beat.
I've been getting up earlier than I have been lately and that half-hour makes quite a bit of difference. On the other hand, my commute is via Metrorail now, so I've got time to read in the morning and afternoon, and I can't argue with that at all.
Lyssa's china cabinet really does look great.. it's solid cherry wood, and we think that it's pushing forty years of age. It's in fine shape, modulo a few nicks and scuffs that probably came from the trip to the apartment, but I don't think that they'll be difficult to take care of.
I'm still up to my neck in paperwork at work.
One Greg Palast, who filmed a documentary on Hurricane Katrina for cable TV is facing federal charges because he filmed some property belonging to Exxon. That's all he did - shoot some footage.
Long, long day. Delayed on the Metro this morning because several trains were having problems with doors not closing. My body isn't used to all the walking around - my ankles are killing me after two days of it. They'll get stronger, though, of this I have no doubt.
Lyssa and I, with the help of Kyrin, picked up the china cabinet and moved it into the apartment. It looks great, especially after Lyssa cleaned it up. I've been up to my neck in paperwork this evening... I wish I'd kept in touch with a few folks back in Pittsburgh. I'm going to have a hell of a time finding them.
I should probably go to bed. I'm not thinking as clearly as I'd like right now.
After two months, I finally got to go into the office today.
It's been long enough that I actually had to hunt to figure out where exactly I was supposed to go and plan a route there. It's readily accessible from the Metro line, but once you get downtown all bets are off. Thankfully buying a cup of coffee and a smile from a nearby Starbucks (I know.. I know.. but at least I can reliably find a Starbucks because they're bloody everywhere) got me walking directions to the building.
After nearly two months of working from home and studying, actually going into an office building gave me a case of culture shock. It's quiet.. very quiet. We're talking college library in the middle of finals quiet, where even the air conditioning barely makes any sound. Unfortunately, I actually could complain, and probably will in the near future: My chair isn't big enough to be comfortable. Specifically, my legs are too long for the chair, so not much of the part I sit on is supported. Combined with the powerful spring that supports the back of the chair, and I always feel like I'm about to slide off and hit the floor.
I was going to write something about personal space and subway cars, but after further consideration I don't think that I had much of anything. One hasty hand motion does not constitute a flinch in close quarters, and the car really did have quite a few people packed into it for the crush home. Maybe it had something to do with low blood sugar, maybe it was just my not thinking things through all the way...
At any rate, it's going to take a while to adapt to my new environment. The mountain of paperwork to fill out will probably help with that.
Half a league, half a league/Half a league onward/All in the valley of Death/Rode the six hundred/"Forward, the Light Brigade!"/"Charge for the guns!" he said:/Into the valley of Death/Rode the six hundred.
George W. Bush went on the record about the secret US prisons in foreign countries.
In other news, the Cult of the Dead Cow has made Paris Hilton an honorary member of the Ninja Strike Force. ...oommmmMM
Join My Cult is now available for download as a .pdf file.
2125 EST/EDT: Lyssa and I are back in DC.
This morning we got up around 0800 EST/EDT to get dressed and hit the road to head back to the Lynch homestead. After getting dressed we discovered that Lyssa's parents had some stuff to take back with us, vis a vis the complete set of Lyssa's grandmother's china in a pair of shipping crates. Thankfully we packed light this time, so we had plenty of room to spare in the TARDIS' trunk and back seat. Everything was carefully wrapped in newspaper and layered in the crates for the trip home.
I don't understand china, or flatware as some people call it to avoid confusion with the country. Well, I do get it, at least in the functional sense. China is the collective name for the various kinds of plates, cups, and saucers that food is served on at home. It usually has a design of some kind around the edge of each piece, and more often than not there's another design right in the middle of each piece for decoration. I also understand the significance it holds for Lyssa: It belonged to her grandmother for a good sixty years or so, and the two of them were very close all of their lives.
But.. I don't get the attraction of china. I'm not a collector. I don't find it intrinsically interesting, and the patterns (with one or two exceptions of pieces in the Smithsonian Museum of History) don't really captivate me. In my book, china is what you eat off of on holidays because it can spoil the mood to eat off the same old same old when company comes over and you've spent all day in the kitchen cooking. The patterns aren't displayed for very long because they're covered up by food, and then a few hours later after they're washed the china goes back in the cabinet for another couple of months.
Maybe I'm being too practical about this.
We finally got moving around 0930 EST/EDT today.
Okay, this is really getting under my skin. Every time I sit down to write something of substance, my mind goes completely blank, no matter what's been going on.
The drive from Mather to Pittsburgh never really gets shorter.. it's at least an hour and a half away, rain or shine, roadway construction or not in Pennsylvania. Because it was Labor Day today the roads were almost devoid of vehicles of any sort, which meant that we made pretty good time back home by way of the core of the city of Pittsburgh proper. In addition to getting ready for a parade of some sort downtown, they're also demolishing some of the older buildings in the heart of the city to make room for... who knows what. Whatever the folks who can afford to buy the property will put up, which will probably be another office block or two.
By the way, for folks travelling northbound - the state police are using the down-driveway of the PennDOT Lone Pine Depot as a speed trap. Cut your speed to (speed limit + 5mph) there.
They've ripped up more of the highway that leads to my parents' place, too. The cliffside has been chopped back another ten feet or so, exposing fresh, new walls of slate and shale that have yet to be weathered into slivers and dust by the automobile exhaust, rain, and wind. The highway was reduced to two lanes, one heading in either direction, and transportable concrete barriers. It was just a year ago that They (whoever They are) bought up all of the abandoned houses and started tearing them down so they could remake the land.
On the whole, I'm not sorry to see those houses go. I don't know what used to go on in them, but I've got my suspicions, and I'm certainly not sorry to see them end.
My mother is doing much better these days. Her diabetes is under control and regular doses of Synthroid are keeping her up and around. My grandfather is enjoying the twilight years of his retirement, watching television and petting Ziggy the cat. Ziggy, true to form, is still pissed off at my leaving the homestead some years ago, and refuses to let me get closer than a yard to her. My mother's been steadily cleaning up the spare room in the house and my old lab, and she's thrown out an amazing amount of cruft since last I've been over to visit. After arriving around 1100 EST/EDT, we sat around drinking coffee and catching up on the past few months. We discussed our finances and our plans for the short and medium term, what's been going on at work, things that have been changing, and all manner of stuff that one would expect of family getting back together.
Lunch consisted of the chili that my mother made yesterday and set aside for us. She also went to the farm of Anna-Marie and Albert and stocked up on fresh produce for us, which we have a difficult time finding consistently in the DC area.
A few months ago, my mother bought one of those nifty VCR/DVD recorder combo units so that she could start converting old family videos into DVDs for archival, as well as to replace the DVD player which was barely operational. However, she waited for my next visit so I could install it for everyone. That isn't that big a deal, I think. So I set about removing the old gear from the entertainment center and figuring out exactly how to go about wiring it into the cable box/VCR/DVD player/surround sound system/widescreen television while my mother went in search of the instruction manual, which had somehow gone missing in weeks previous. It really wasn't too hard, once you knew where each cable was headed and what it was doing, but it was a tight fit behind the entertainment center and I'm neither as skinny nor as flexible as I once was, so it required a goodly amount of stretching and pulling shelves away from the wall with brute force.
It's a slick little unit, I have to admit. It can record television like a VCR can, it can play back DVDs, it can play back videocassettes, and it can record to either DVD or videocassette assuming that you've got it hooked up properly. It can also play back a tape and record the output directly to a DVD by pressing a single button... I've got to get one of those suckers so I can archive all the weird old sci-fi movies I used to tape off of HBO at 0300 when I was a kid.
My mother, however, has other plans, which involve family videos...
Those of you who've been in this position before are already shivering. I can tell.
The videos were of stuff I did when I was about thirteen years of age.
Can we say 'carpet bombing of dignity', boys and girls?
Sure. I knew you could.
To be honest, though, it wasn't that bad. Looking back on those years I was a goofy little kid. Just starting puberty and just beginning to go mad from hormones, and probably at that age where I started wanting to come into my own and do my own thing. Maybe a bit of a smartass. I'm fairly certain that everyone is like that around that age, which continues for a couple of years. Until the sullen or manically overachieving mid-teens kick in, anyway. It was a little embarassing, but then again home movies tend to be. We were still sharing little snippets of special times, like carving the Thanksgiving turkey, putting up the Yule tree, and watching the snow come down early in December of 1993.
It was a nice walk down memory lane.
All too soon, though, it came time to leave so that Lyssa and I would make it back to DC at a reasonable time. We loaded up the vegetables and a few small things that I was taking back with me (nothing special, just drive bay covers for Leandra's chassis (I hope)), got into the TARDIS, and set off for the PA turnpike for a few hours.
Gas in Pennsylvania is extremely inexpensive when compared to DC. The cheap stuff was $2.71 at the lowest, $2.98 for 93 octane petrol.
The highway really wasn't too bad up until we started getting close to the Maryland border, at which time traffic slowed to a crawl. We watched one minivan pull over to the side of the road and park, ostensible to rest and kill time until traffic freed up. About two miles down the road, once we started moving again, we saw a red sports car that has seen better incarnations: The front end, hood, roof (holy shit), and windscreen (oh, boy) had been smashed so thoroughly that it looked as if the car had tried and failed to do a somersault on I-76 east. I didn't see any ambulances around, just a lone police car and a wrecker, so if there was anyone in there, they're long gone, for some definition of long gone.
I hope that whoever was in that car is okay, or if not, that the crash and end were mercifully quick.
Around 1800 EST/EDT (I think) we stopped off for dinner in Maryland at the nearest Cracker Barrel franchise that we could find. At first we hit the Waffle House across the parking lot from it (that's really the name of it, folks) but the inside looks like... how can I put this? The inside of the Waffle House looks like an old, old diner from a bad 60's movie. It was dirty, there was no service visible, and the jukebox was an ancient machine the size of an industrial washing machine that had over two hundred separate country/western music tracks. Hot and cold running Tammy Wynette, and I don't mean multiple KLF remixes. Oh, did I mention that it was dirty inside?
We ran, not walked, to Cracker Barrel, for all that entails.
Very, very tasty and filling. Thankfully I've got my cardiologist on speed dial. While my second heart takes over the strain, I should be able to put out an emergency page.
We're now at home and resting. The china has been unpacked and stored in the library until we can find a china closet (does anyone know where we could buy one in the DC metropolitan area??) and we're catching up on everything that happened while we were gone. The fish, including Baku (the new betta) were overjoyed to see us as we walked in, and demanded their daily tribute of food because they've been fasting for the past two days.
Steve "the Crocodile Hunter" Irwin, RIP.
Speaking of the past two days, on Saturday afternoon while we were waiting for dinner to finish Lyssa and I happened across the movie Alien: Resurrection on one of the digital cable channels that her parents get via Comcast. I'd only seen it once before, and was utterly unimpressed by it. In fact, the novelisation of the movie is one that I got rid of willingly (along with the novelisation of the second Crow movie, which sucked just as much), and I don't get rid of books unless you hold a gun to my head. The movie hasn't aged very well at all. Sure, it has a pretty good cast, like Winona Ryder, Sigourney Weaver (who has been aging very well), Ron Pearlman (it can't be bad if Pearlman's in it, right? Right?), and beltsander-voiced Michael Wincott (who played Top Dollar in The Crow, because no one ever remembers his name, just the characters he plays), but it's needlessly bloody and gory. Sure, it's got subtext galore that slashers go nuts over (and in this flick, you need something to keep your attention to make it to the end credits), but that's just not enough for me. The action is a lot of running and shooting... definitely not the creepy-as-hell game of cat-and-mouse that the xenomorphs played with the human(-ish) characters in the three earlier movies.
Frankly, I wish the franchise had stayed dead with Alien 3. Hollywood has this habit of taking dead and buried stories and turning them into mindless zombies. I honestly can't recommend this movie to anyone, unless you happen to be a really hardcore, acid-flowing-in-your-veins fan of the movies.
But on a high point, the Wikipedia entry on H.R. Giger. Fascinating.
Lyssa and I made it back to Pennsylvania around 2130 EST/EDT yesterday. I left the conference around 1400 and headed for home, and surprise of surprises found my way back without any trouble. That's twice in the same year. Someone call Guinness, someone get me a Guiness, and will someone please help me chase away that reporter from the Weekly World News??
But seriously, I made it home without any trouble, we packed up our stuff for a weekend, and set off for her parents' place. They're having a Labor Day cookout this weekend, and Lyssa's sister just got engaged, so they want to celebrate that as well.
The drive up was uneventful.. we stopped at a sports bar for dinner before hitting the highway. I've never wished that I had a TV-B-Gone before.. still, our hamburgers and french fries were tasty and the experience was overall quite enjoyable. The trip was thankfully unventful - nothing bad happened, aside from fog and rain slowing us down a little bit.
Update the first:
The short time that Lyssa and I had to run around the area to get breakfast this morning was very welcome.. the weather in Pennsylvania has been unusually nice lately, a fine change from the ninety-plus degrees Farenheit that it's been lately. In fact, it's unusually cool right now, so much so that I've been wearing jeans and long sleeves as much as possible.
To be fair,the rain, mist, and fog that we drove through to get up here had a lot to do with it.
Lyssa's father set up the professional-grade propane grille in the back yard, along with an electric split to rotisserie-grille a half-dozen whole chickens(!) for dinner today. Lyssa's parents like to make a lot of food when they have guests over for a feast; in this case, Lyssa's sister has officially announced her engagement, which is always a reason to celebrate.
After dinner today we sat around for a while and let our food digest. Knitting came out and beers were passed around the table in the back yard. Time wa spent trying to figure out what, exactly, to do for the rest of the night. As i turns out, we decided to find a bowling alley that was open to bowl a few frames for fun.
Because it was a Sunday ngiht in Pennsylvania, this wound up being far more difficult than it really had to be. The first alley was closed, but the second, out on route 19, didn't close until 2300 EST/EDT and even had a few lanes open.
I seem to say this a lot when bowling comes up: Just because I was in a bowling league when I was in high school does not mean that I am a particularly good bowler. I think the best I bowled tonight was 86 in my first game. We managed to get two games in before they started shutting lanes down for the night. Mike, Jill's fiencee', is an excellent bowler, and beat most of us soundly..
It's 0853 EST/EDT on a Saturday, and I'm sitting in the conference room at Georgetown University, waiting for the conference to start again. For some reason it was pretty easy to get up at 0700 EST/EDT on a Saturday.. maybe I'm getting old.
Lyssa and I are going to be driving back to Pennsylvania this evening.. I'm not looking forward to this. It's been raining lately (though it seems to have lightened up somewhat as of this morning) and driving has been hazardous in the DC area. In recent years, this has made me shaky about driving at times like this... I worry a lot about going out of control or getting hurt (or one of my passengers getting hurt, horror of horrors.
If it's one thing that aging teaches you, it's that you have a lot to lose.
It's been a long day.. I've been at a conference for work on a rainy, dreary, yucky day. The tropical storm that's been battering the southern United States (why, no, I haven't been trolling the newswires lately...) is starting to manifest effects farther north in the country, so the rain's been cold and at times blowing sideways. The area in which Lyssa and I live has been under a flood watch for most of today. The drive to the college the conference is being held at isn't too bad, surprisingly enough. Even with rush hour traffic, it doesn't take very long to get there.
I don't actually have much to write about right now.. the conference will continue tomorrow, and then Lyssa and I will be heading home for the Labor Day weekend.
I finally get to go into work next Wednesday. The paperwork's finally been worked out.
Busy yesterday. Cate's computer underwent an emergency rebuild in my lab and had to be tweaked and configured in a hurry so that it could be returned to her at Rialian's last night.
On Tuesday night, Hasufin hosted the weekly stitch-and-bitch that we've been getting together for in the DC metro area. It's just a few of us getting together to eat dinner, hang out, and work on whatever projects we have going at the moment. Most everyone knits or is learning to do so; I've been writing or (more often lately) working on a computer or two. On Tuesday night Hasufin was nice enough to grill hot dogs and sausages on the grill out back and made a few batches of brownies for dessert.. the ones from scratch blow away the Gevalia fudge brownies he made, no two ways about it.
Cate's computer is running a little short on RAM for my tastes but it runs well enough for what she needs it for.. thankfully the reconstruction didn't take very long. As with most things these days, installing the patches takes longer than actually installing the OS and all of the applications anymore.
Last night we trucked out to Rialian's place to hang out with everyone, and were joined by Kyrin the Toxic Elf, who seems to be doing much better lately, and came back form Pennsic with quite a few stories to tell, both good and bad.
We called it an early night because we haven't been getting nearly as much sleep as we actually need these days, and neither of us particularly want to get sick this weekend. We have to go back to Pennsylvania this weekend, which is going to be a rough enough journey because I also have a conference to attend this weekend.
Interesting times, indeed.
If nothing else, it'll be nice to take a break this weekend after everything is said and done.
Printing's working!
So if you haven't heard by now they're making a live action/CG movie based upon The Transformers. An early trailer has been posted to the site which doesn't give away much of anything at all... until someone on the set snuck a few pictures of props and put them on the Net. There is also some concept art of Megatron floating around... and for the first time ever he looks like a badass (though his voice is probably not going to be done by Gary Chalk, sad to say). There are more photographs taken by someone else on the set over here (click on the thumbnails to see the full-sized images).
Even if it does wind up sucking, I'd still like to see it for the special effects.
I'm baaaAAAAAAAAcccckkkkk....
So I've been busy as hell these past few days.
Leandra was in such a bad way that Mozilla Firefox could not render pages in under two and one half minutes and the CPU load incurred from one of her users downloading files to back them up made it impossible to even get a realtime list of the processes running in her memory field. I bought the last component necessary (a 64-bit AMD Athlon X2 4800+, which is.. hell, I don't feel like doing the math right now, at least two orders of magnetude faster than her old CPU) and started backing up all of the data in her drive arrays to DVD-ROM.
The extra CPU load from burning all those DVDs made it slow, slow going.
It took most of last Thursday to pull Leandra out of her shell and put her into safekeeping for a while while I basically gutted her chassis. I had to replace everything, from her motherboard all the way up to her graphics card. It isn't a particularly difficult thing to do once you know your way around inside a computer, I was taking a lot of care while I did it because the only place that has enough room to take apart an entire server-sized case is the living room, complete with carpet and static electricity hazards. Even with antistatic grounding there's no sense in being too careful.
Is it just me, or do CPUs get harder and harder to install with each new advance in technology? The Athlon/64's now come with excellent heatsinks, but there is now a lever on them to clamp the heatsink down; the trick is not breaking the bloody thing or damaging the CPU.
Leandra's motherboard is theoretically capable of RAID. In a practical sense, however, it's not really hardware-based RAID. What happens is that the chipset sets up whatever RAID level you tell it to (I've got a pair of 250GB drives in Leandra that are mirrored), but unless the OS has the requisite drivers it treats the hard drives as... a couple of hard drives and not a RAID array.
"Hell with this," I thought. Because I was installing Gentoo Linux (because it has a well-tested 64-bit port).
Gentoo is definitely not for newbies. You really need to know about Linux to get it up and running because a lot of the installation process is performed manually. I used the LiveCD to get Leandra bootstrapped.. to be honest I wasn't very impressed by the graphical installer because it didn't give me the opportunity to set up software RAID as well as logical volume management, but thankfully the procedure to do this is documented.
In a nutshell, it's far easier than it looks. For the record, build the software RAID array (this can take a while, so it might be worth your time to go get something to eat or go to work while this runs), then set up logical volume management and build virtual partitions. Then go through the Gentoo install as documented, but remember the stuff you have to change (also documented).
That probably doesn't make very much sense. I'll write a better version later.
To make a long story short I pulled a couple of all-nighters in short succession to get Gentoo Linux installed on Leandra and get everything fixed up. Unlike many times before, I had a hell of a time getting Xorg running from user accounts that didn't have root privileges.. as it turns out, I was mounting the partition that Xorg was kept on (/usr) with the nosuid option, which strips executables of their elevated privileges for security's sake.. but this also breaks X. I spent some time on the #gentoo-amd64 with some folks trying to figure it out and once I got it fixed, that was that. It was time to start installing software.
I also had a hell of a scare yesterday with the packaging system of Gentoo, called Portage. I'm going to try not to overcomplicate this to keep eyes from bleeding so soon after coming back online... Portage is a system by which software packages are downloaded, compiled, and installed with a minimum of work on the part of the sysadmin. Dependencies between packages are also maintained by the Portage system. Portage has two branches, one for packages considered stable and one for packages that are under testing before inclusion in the stable branch. The testing branch is also for new versions of applications.
You can upgrade a machine with a simple command that will probably run all day. You can also upgrade each and every package on a machine to the version in the testing branch if you're feeling brave.
This can break stuff.
I'd accidentally turned on the 'testing' switch in Portage late the night before, and to be frank I was afraid that I was about to hose Leandra but good and have to reinstall everything.
That didn't happen. I caught it before any of her systemware was migrated to the testing branch and she's healthy and happy.
Next up: Printing, OpenOffice, a decent graphical e-mail client, and most of all, restoring everyone's websites.
Of all the topics that are on the list of collegiate studies that you can get federal aid for, evolutionary biology is no longer one of them. No one knows why it was stricken from the list, only that it was.
Some people have way too much fun with Photoshop.
A cluster of 13 conservative groups are urging the FBI and Justice Department to determine if porn flicks shown in hotels violate any obscenity laws. Not that they know first hand what they're like, or anything...
Hey, folks? Why don't you pay more attention to your own families and leave people who just want to relax after a long plane flight with a porn flick alone? They're not hurting anyone.
Lyssa and I got a lot done from home yesterday; she'd missed her shuttle and had to work out of the office while I'm stll working from home. We got a good bit of the house picked up because we had another stitch-and-bitch last night, and I did some running around during the day. Specifically, I had to get my car inspected for the purposes of registration, which took about an hour out of my day. I packed up my laptop and drove down to the car dealership, where I killed about an hour and a half writing code on my laptop and generally waiting to see what the damage would be.
There wasn't any damage, actually. $15us later, the TARDIS was checked out and good for another year.
Attention TOR users: The sysadmin of the site called The Jungle is running out of bandwidth, and can't keep it online. He or she is looking for someone to take over. If anyone out there is interested, post in the forums.
This should make anyone who works his or her ass off sit up and take notice: The eighth circuit court of appeals has ruled that police can legally confiscate sums of money from drivers in the absence of probable cause. The court ruling is hyperlinked off of the article.
Geez... this is enough to keep people up at night worrying: Gigantic yellowjacket nests, one completely filling an abandoned '55 Chevy. Other nests have been found in abandoned barns of mammoth size in southern Alabama. What's more, the nests are splintering into satellite nests some distance away. Entomologists think that the nests contain multiple queens, each with its own distinct swarm, and that the nests are actually partitioned inside to keep them separate.
Thousands of Marines who were discharged in the past have been called back to active duty because recruitment figures are at an all-time low. So far, about ten thousand former Marines have been placed back on active duty.
Leandra's new CPU, an AMD Athlon/64 X2 4800+ arrived in the mail this afternoon, shortly before I left to pick up Lyssa at work. I'll be heading out early tomorrow morning to take Mika to work and haunt the NASA surplus sale for a laptop for Lyssa.
I'll be taking her offline sometime tomorrow so that I can install the new hardware, as well as reinstall all of her systemware from scratch.
Sargeant Thomas Kelt, who was reported to his superiors on several occasions for lying to potential recruits to meet his monthly quota hasn't been disciplined, he's been promoted to a supervisory position of another recruiting office. Sgt. Kelt was reported for telling a few high school kids that they might be arrested if they didn't sign up for the Army after graduation.. the Army says that he is in an ideal position to supervise other recruiters since he violated most of their recruitment ethics guidelines.
This could mean one of three things: Either Kelt narrowly got pitched out on his ear as a result of what he did (unlikely) and they're giving him one more chance, they're giving him a 'window seat' to keep an eye on him and minimise the damage he could do (if you want to prevent someone from actually doing anything, a famous saying says, make them management), or someone actually thinks that putting someone who freely lied to potential recruits in charge of recruiters is a good and helpful thing (which makes about as much sense as putting a pyromaniac in charge of building a campfire).
The next Stephen Hawking, to be sure.
Following the release of almost three-quarters of a million web search criteria to the Net Maureen Govern, Chief Technical Officer of America On-Line resigned her position. When asked, AOL declined to comment. In other news, a Slashdot reader posted what he or she thinks are her last few Web searches.
The RIAA is now trying to get tablature to songs figured out by fans taken off the Net. It seems that not only is it illegal to rip your own CDs, but apparently it's illegal to figure out how to play songs on your own, too.
George Bush admits on national television that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
Ann Coulter to blame Hitler on Charles Darwin. That's right, the theory of evolution is to blame for World War II.. just as much as it is to blame for digital computers winning out over analogue, unleaded gas being used more in consumer cars and trucks more than diesel fuel, and the results of American Idol and Survivor.
And.. even if Darwin hadn't hit on the idea of social evolution (it would be redundant to use 'Darwinism' so soon after a proper name), that doesn't mean that the principle didn't already exist.
The first Baptist church of Watertown, New York canned Mrs. Mary Lambert after working for 54 years as a Sunday school teacher because they've decided to interpret the first Epistle to Timothy literally.
Folks, you're going to have to read this article all the way through. I can do no justice to this story save the following words: Holy shit - genetic chimaerism in court.
No, really.
Today's been an odd day as they go, especially on a weekend. Kash was coming over to spend the day.. specifically, Lyssa had to go to the mall to pick up some stuff for her skin, the Kash wanted to go to a Sony Style store (basically a brand outlet) and then we would be heading into DC to visit a specialty bath store called Lush..
First off, we got up early to order tickets for a concert coming up as the website opened, because projections had it that they'd sell out fast. This wasn't terribly difficult, and took just a couple of minutes. The hardest part was trying to find my login for the ticket reselling agency in question, which I have yet to locate in the office.. this always happens after I clean.
Ghost wasn't looking good at all this morning, which I'll elaborate upon later to get it all out of my head. He wasn't strong enough to even make it to the surface to gulp down air, let alone get at the food that we've been trying to give him.
Lyssa and I got cleaned up and dressed and awaited Kash's arrival, which was around 1100 EST/EDT on Saturday. I wound up making breakfast for everyone, eggs in one form or another, biscuits, and turkey bacon, and then went to take a shower. We'd be doing quite a bit of running around today, and needed to be comfortable. I went with my standard t-shirt and shorts, while Lyssa wore her new pants and t-shirt.
Ghost died this morning somewhen around noon. I'd been popping into the office to check up on him when I found him laying on his side on the bottom of the bowl. Over the past day or so I've been watching his colour fade as the blood left his fins and later on his tail, giving him a sickly colour. The blood was pooling in his body, giving him an unusually ruddy colour, and causing his gill membranes to swell and protrude, probably a reflexive attempt to get more oxygen into his blood. By this time, he was barely even trying to get water past his gills. At last he tried to swim but sank to the bottom convulsing, or as much as fish are capable of doing. I didn't know that the very tips of a betta's fins and tail could move on their own, but somehow they were twitching independently of the rest of Ghost's body. His gill covers extended so far that I thought his head would come off, and the membranes of his gills were bright red tufts of fuzz swaying in the water as his body shook out of control.
After a minute or so, the twitching stopped and his gills collapsed. That was that.
I've only seen something die once, and that was a bird that had been hit by a car (I presume) and left laying on the side of the road many, many years ago. Even then, it left me shaken and feeling like I'd seen something forbidden, which mortals were not meant to look upon. I still feel a little out of sorts by this.. intellectually, I know that Ghost was just a fish of questionable age, breeding, and origin (Pet Smart isn't renowned for the health of their fish), but on the other hand he was a living creature, loved and cared for by Lyssa, his owner, and appreciated by everyone who looked at him. He swam around in his little bowl, ate what we fed him, and generally brightened our days.
There was a minor amount of hilarity as we tried to fish Ghost's corpse out of the bowl without accidentally picking up too many of the plastic 'stones' (I'm being charitable there) for disposal. This took a bit of finangling and digging but we managed to get him out of the bowl and given a burial at sea.
After doing the deed, the three of us headed to the Tyson's Corner mall so that Lyssa could get new makeup (her old makeup was contaminated enough with skin oil and suchlike that it was causing her to break out). Kash and I hit the Sony Style store so he could check out the new Sony VAIO sub-notebook computers, which I must admit are very tasty looking, and weigh about as much as your average book... we had to drag ourselves out of there to meet up with Lyssa again to go to Lush, which is a rather ritzy and expensive bath-stuff store in Georgetown.
Lush actually wasn't to hard to find from the directions we got off the Net. The hardest part was finding parking down there because the public lots were closed, and if you couldn't find a space along the main drag you had to find someplace to park on a side street someplace and hope that you didn't get ticketed or towed. We fould a little space off of 29th Street that had one hour parking, and took full advantage of it. Lush's fares are very nifty, I must admit. They make all of their stuff in small batches from raw ingredients of known quality and origin. If at all possible, they go organic for their raw materials, and you can try just about anything they have in the store as long as you don't make a mess. There are bath bombs, which are balls that fizz in the bathtub and release essential oils, scents, and whatnot; there are shampoos and soaps and bath bars that smell like just about anything you can imagine (coal tar? sour apple? chocolate? seaweed?). There are even butter-bars, which are like bars of soap but are made out of oils that quite literally melt in your fingers that are supposed to moisturise your skin. They've got lots of neat stuff there; I was very impressed by both the quality and the scents of their products; if I hadn't bought a new motherboard for Leandra yesterday morning, I would have bought a shower gel called "Sonic Death Monkey", which includes such essentials as coffee, chocolate, and lime juice..
Just what this world needs at 0700 on a Monday: A Time Lord with three shots of espresso in its blood stream, courtesy of some soap.
We got back to the car just a few minutes before the parking deadline and picked our way back home to get ready for Hasufin's housewarming picnic.. of course, it took us a lot longer to get back home because we didn't have explicit directions for the return trip. Somehow we blundered our way back to the Beltway and made it home around 1400 EST/EDT, just in time to be fashionably late.
As it turns out, we were a bit more than fashionably late, but then again by the time we actually got on the road to Hasufin's new house, only two guests were there, namely Mika and Butterfly. Because his new digs are out by our local Trader Joe's and Whole Paycheque, we stopped by the latter to pick up some stuff to bring (mostly because Whole Paycheque's apple pies are amazingly good, and because they have a better selection of gluten free stuff for Kash than TJ's does). Trying to find a good cheese took the better part of a half hour because the cheese selection there is, to be blunt, on the dodgy side. I'd much prefer going to the other one out on Maple Avenue East in northern Virginia. Anyway, we arrived at our destination around 1700 EST/EDT, just as the charcoal got going. After the application of judicious amounts of lighter fluid.
As Hasufin put it, some days you've got it, and some days you really, really don't.
Butterfly and I spent some time talking and catching up while Lyssa and Hasufin got the grille going outside. Hasufin's done an amazing job with the house in a comparatively short period of time: Between the hardwood floors and the shelves he built, the place looks really sharp, I have to admit.
We wound up sitting around outside nibbling cheese and crackers and passing around the insect repellent until the coals were hot enough to do actuall grilling over.. Mika made turkey burgers for us and Hausfin grilled corn on the cob as an appetiser. Mika and I split part of a DuClaws growler of beer, just a glass each because a growler is far more beer than any of us really wanted to drink. Hasufin shortly thereafter brought out the half-melon of doom, which consisted of half a hollowed out melon filled with sundry liquors, of which rum and vodka were represented for certain. Said half-melon had a number of straws in it, so we passed it around a couple of times and had our fill. As far as I know, we never did get to the second half of the melon on Saturday night. Perhaps that's for the best.
Last night was basically a night of sitting around and talking, as one might expect of close friends... somehow we started discussing porn when Rhianna and Rab arrived around 2100 EST/EDT last night. They've been extremely busy lately, what with work and Rab's immigration status, so they've been off the radar for a while.
Lyssa, Kash, Butterfly, and I wound up leaving around 2300 EST/EDT last night because we'd been up early and were starting to run down. We dropped Butterfly off at the Metro station because it was on our way home, and then headed in to get a good night's sleep.
This morning, we met up with Hasufin and Mika and went out to the Indian buffet for lunch.. I don't know what it is about that place, but my stomach's been giving me hell every time we go there. Maybe it's because we get the buffet; maybe it's eating Indian early on a Sunday; maybe it's something else. I'm not sure. At any rate, Mika and Hasufin went off to go thrifting while Lyssa, Kash, and I stopped off to pick up out subscriptions from Big Planet Comics (which amounted to three dozen issues because we haven't been there in two months), then the local petstore so that Lyssa could get another betta (a dark blue male that she calls Baku). We dropped them off afterward and then Kash and I headed back to Tyson's Corner mall so that he could pick up his new laptop computer. The paperwork took over an hour to run, so I hit up Barnes and Noble to get coffee (and wonder why the place was so packed today).
So many toys... so little time.
Interesting news from China: The first human trials of a vaccine for HIV were successful. Forty-nine participants, ages 18 to 50 recieved the vaccine and later varying doses of samples of DNA from strains of HIV and showed a positive immune response, indicating at least partial immunity. Kong Wei, leader of the research team, stated that increased dosages of HIV DNA showed a correspondingly greater immune response. The test subjects were periodically sampled during the 180 day trial. It is still too early to determine if the experiment was an unqualified success, however.
This from a former close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr., huh?
That whirring sound you now hear is MLKjr breaking mach one in his grave.
Evanescence tickets ordered. This will be interesting.
A new CPU for Leandra has been ordered - an AMD Athlon 64 X2. It's high time she's gone multi-core.
Ghost is on his last legs, I think. He can't even swim, anymore.
Been playing more with Sun Solaris and OpenBSD in my lab. I have to hand it to the OpenBSD project, I really like how they handle packages.. if you compile something out of the ports tree, it gets turned into a regular package for transparent installation. If you use the pkg_add utility, it can download the packages (and dependencies, as I found out too late) for you transparently.
The Microsoft beta experience: The pleasure of testing.
Whoever put this page up has never done software testing before, of that I am certain.
Is it a film? Is it a Mondo 2000 cover? Who knows?
Old, old, old school gamers who remember the days of 8-bit computers and video games, especially those by Epyx, whose games were famous for being challenging as well as catchy. An outfit called System 3 bought the rights to their games and is porting them to a number of modern hand-held game systems, such as the PSP and the Nintendo Wii. The first two games they'll be releasing will be old favourites, namely Impossible Mission and California Games, and will be released in January of 2007.
Instructions for properly installing JASS, the Sun Solaris Security Toolkit.
First off, you'll ned a Sunsolve account to download the package (currently v4.2.0). This is free, and you can opt out of the spam. Transfer the package (SUNWjass-4.2.0.pkg.tar.Z) to the Solaris box in question.
That's it. Sun didn't actually document this process properly, and neither have any of my Solaris books. JASS will be installed into the directory /opt/SUNWjass.
This makes me twitch visibly (and yet is still safe for work).
I don't know if this is legit, or even feasible, but someone apparently rigged up a jet engine to a Volkswagon bug.
Zoethe weighs in on the increased security measures of airports, and she's got a few things to say on the matter...
Way, way, way back when, I wrote about Judge Donald Thompson of Oklahoma, who got in trouble for using a penis pump while court was in session. That's right.. in front of everyone. He's been sentenced to four years in prison and a $40kus fine for exposing himself in public to do so, using said penis pump while on the bench, and indecent exposure.
The UK news magazine called the Register has put its two cents in on the attempt to synthesise a liquid explosive in mid-air that's caused airports to go into lockdown mode, and the chemists they've spoken to are saying more or less the same thing: Not bloody likely. The article is interesting and informative while remaining nontechnical, so it's not going to make your eyes bleed.
Interesting times, indeed... one Lou Beres, formerly of the Oregon Christian Coalition confessed guilt to the charges of sexual molestation he was hit with in December of 2005, levelled by his daughters and sister in law. You can read a copy of the police report here, but sensitive readers should take caution - there's some stuff in that police report that'll make your blood boil. As it turns out, Beres thought that the statute of limitations was up so he thought he had nothing to fear...
It appears that Chuck Norris is on vacation and Bruce Schneier is holding down the fort.
NASA has announced that they've observed the separation of 'normal' matter and dark matter using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. There will be a teleconference today at 1300 EST/EDT, linked off of this article.
Talk about getting railroaded.. the American Atheists have filed suit in federal court on behalf of Nicole Smalkowsi of the state of Oklahoma. Nicole is an atheist who refused to participate in a mandatory recitation of the twenty-third psalm, and was thrown off of the girls' basketball team as a result. After that, it appears that open season was declared on the girl and her family. The principle is said to have gotten into a fight with her father during a meeting. Somehow, he was then arrested, and told that if he and his family moved out of the town, charges against him would be dropped. In court before a jury of their peers, they were amazingly told that the word of an atheist could not stand up before that of a 'God fearing man' (the jurors said this, it should be noted). So much for impartiality.. still, Chester Smalkowski was acquitted of the charges of assault.
On this topic, I'll say no more, other than do your own research on what happened there.
Damn, it's good to be a gangsta. (safe for work)
Things are in something of an inconsistent state around the apartment at this time. Leandra's straining under the weight of everything she's doing at this moment, which to be truthful isn't much. I've been cutting back her responsibilities because she's getting up in years (she's only running at 800MHz and I can't get much more performance out of her without altering the circuitry on her mainboard). Even now, using Firefox to browse a simple web page has her CPU pegged, and the browser window hasn't updated in four minutes and counting. Yesterday afternoon I picked up RAM for the new motherboard I bought a while ago, and next on the hit list is a CPU. Once I've got a CPU, I'll be taking Leandra offline to back everything up and upgrade her hardware. An OS upgrade will take place soon after.
Ghost, one of Lyssa's bettas, isn't doing so well, either. He's been listless for over a month now, and spends most of his time at the bottom of his bowl. We've determined that he's suffering from swim bladder disease, probably due to a lack of variety in his diet. This morning, he even stopped trying to swim and refuses to eat. His scales are drab-looking and getting damaged from laying on the bottom all the time. I don't think that he'll last much longer. A water change this morning to clean out his bowl and get freshly oxygenated water into his environment didn't do anything helpful. I don't think he'll last much longer.
The USB chassis for laptop-sized hard drives I picked up yesterday will be returned this afternoon. The hard drive I'd intended to put in it is ever so slightly too large to fit, rendering it useless. I've had to purchase a second KVM (keyboard/virtual monitor; basically it allows you to use one keyboard, mouse, and monitor with more than one computer) to make it easier to get around in my lab (again, partially due to Leandra's age). I hope to do some work on my test machine this afternoon, as well as the replacement for Lain.
For the halibut this afternoon I dug out my briefcase (which has been in the office closet ever since I bought a new laptop backpack) and found all of the serial adapters that I've been searching for. Dammit. Next stop: That Sun Sparcstation 10.
Last night, Lyssa and I drove out to Maryland and Rialian's place to spend the evening, and wound up hanging out until 2300 EST/EDT, much later than usual for us during the week. Cate and N- were there last night, which left Ri and Helen with a full house, and all of us quite busy for the entire evening. I found myself keeping track of no fewer than three conversations at one time last night, and enjoyed every last one of them.
Perhaps it's for the best that Lyssa and I will be staying close to home tonight. We had a stitch-and-bitch on Tuesday night and went to Rialian and Helen's last night, and we could probably use a rest.
When you become a parent, your musical tastes are going to change greatly, because you'll be playing a lot of music for the little ones and not so much for yourself anymore (unless someone's watching them and you've got headphones on).
Until now.
Presenting Baby Rock Records, an outfit which does lullaby-style covers of the music of such bands as Metallica, Pink Floyd, the Cure, Smashing Pumpkins, and the Beatles.
Kitty got bling-bling!
A Persian cat named Sebastian was born with an unusual birth defect, namely, lower canine teeth that protrude like a bulldog's. David Steele, the owner of Sebastian as well as a dentist bonded gold crowns to the teeth to protect them.
US District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor of Detroit, Michigan has declared the US government's warrantless surveillance programme unconstitutional because it violates the people's rights to free speech and privacy, as well as the separation of the powers of government written into the Constitution. Judge Taylor called for an immediate end to the programme but an appeal has already been filed.
Here's an interesting news article to start the day, a lively discussion of surveillance in the workplace, courtesy of Securityfocus. These days, it's practically SOP to record everything that employees do on their networks these days, or as close to all of it as possible. Web browsing can be watched, especially if you have to go through a proxy server. E-mail and instant messenger traffic can be and are recorded as a matter of course. As long as you sign off on giving permission to do so, they can monitor what you do and say, right?
Not necessarily.
The laws in all 50 states are different with respect to recording telephone conversations. In some state, only one party has to give consent. In others, all parties on the call have to give consent. When the parties on the call are in states with different laws, though, things get hinky as far as the courts are concerned. The laws which cover telephone conversations are often applied to e-mail as well, where things get even more shaky. Recording e-mail isn't the same as tapping a phone call: Messages are in transit as long as they're in the wire; once they get to a mail server they sit in a queue with other messages, at which time the e-mails can either be opened and silently read or copied to another storage medium for later analysis. There are other ways of monitoring e-mail, such as using a packet sniffer to watch the message as it comes down the wire, but that tends to be a less reliable tactic because you have to make sure that you're actually paying attention at the right time to grab a copy of the right message. Also, which laws apply here? Those for telecommunication monitoring, those for mail sent through the US postal service, or some other set of laws which may or may not exist at the present time? The US Supreme Court says that the interests of personal privacy take priority over corporate regulations, contracts, or workplace stipulations.
There's an interesting loophole in the law these days which makes one party consent apply to e-mail monitoring, and that is the fact that an e-mail is considered to have been recieved as soon as it hits the local mail server; it does not matter if the message has actually been opened and read by the primary recipient or not, only that it's been stored in the location it's expected to be stored.
An international commission of astronomers may have shaken up the Sol system with a single pronouncement: The Solar system has twelve planets, not nine. The standards of what is and is not considered a planet are a little fuzzy because size is relative. In other words, one astronomer's planet is another's asteroid with a regular orbit. The kicker is that multiple heavenly bodies out beyond the orbit of Pluto have been discovered in the past few years, and they fit the new criteria for planethood (which is a heavenly body that has enough mass that it possesses a gravity well strong enough to smooth out the surface). After this debate, Pluto is still considered a planet and is joined by the objects Ceres (formerly an asteroid), Charon (formerly one of the moons of Pluto, leaving Nix and Hydra, which were discovered in 2005), and 2003 UB313 ("Xena").
The universe just got a little bit bigger.
If you've purchased a Dell laptop computer in the past two or three years, you should be aware that they're announced a recall on the power cellsfrom certain lots designed for certain models. I suggest that you check out this website and make sure that you're not putting your laptop at risk.
I've updated the setlist from the PLAY! concert a few weeks ago with corrections provided by Elwing.
Wow. Heroin delivered right to your door.
Please check this out, everyone.
What a development. As if there wasn't enough to worry about. And this isn't very reassurring.
This could be the ultimate in "do what I mean" technology: The multi-touch touchscreen. Give this a watch, folks... this is like fingerpainting with a computer, a fully intuitive user interface that needs no manual, because it is literally just like moving stuff around on top of your kitchen table with your fingers. You don't need any funky position tracker gear, either - no gloves, no rings, nothing like that.
Leave it to SomethingAwful.com to go through the leaked AOL search logs for the scary stuff.
Note: This is Something Awful, folks... if you're at work, don't go here. If you're easily offended, for pity's sake don't read this.
Another restless night. My sleep schedule is nicely messed up, partially due to exhaustion, which brings me right along to the "partially due to the naps I took" bit. I kept waking up every half hour or so, usually for no good reason but sometimes I kept feeling large amounts of code rushing around in my head.
It was one of THOSE nights, where I kept dreaming that I was programming and I wanted to get the code I was dream-writing into a file.
My stomach's also been bothering me lately: While breakfast yesterday morning was very tasty, I think the Indian food I had tore my digestive tract up some. On the whole, I could have done without the intense discomfort, to try to be vague about it, but it seems to have past.
On Saturday morning, Lyssa and I set about perfecting the lost art of sitting around and doing absolutely nothing. That afternoon we drove up to Maryland to hit the Montgomery Mall to get some clothes, because it's been a while, and dis