People who remember the phone phreaking scene of the 1980's will no doubt be saddened to hear of the passing of Joe Engressia, who used the name Joybubbles toward the end of his life. Engressia, who was blind since birth, was famous for his sense of perfect pitch that let him whistle a 2600 Hz tone that was used to denote a usable telephony trunk during the days before electronic telephony switching. Playing this tone into a phone line at the time would allow someone with a blue box to manipulate the telephone switching network manually. Engressia was also known …
Between getting back home from a field assignment late on Friday night, recovering from two weeks on the road eating way too much takeout, and stuff happening at home, I haven't had much time to do anything in the way of writing. I can honestly say that it hasn't been a boring couple of weeks, but there's a lot to be said for sitting at home engaging in a high impact workout (read, my glutius maximii striking the couch at -9.8 m/s^2 once a night for five nights) to unwind.
It's official - the new release from Information Society, entitled Synthesizer will be released for general sale the first week of October, 2007. However, there is a limited edition of the album available right now, and like before there are only 1000 copies being made. Once they're gone, they're gone, and you'll have to wait two more months before you can buy it.
Last night was another small-group-dinner with the guys from work, meaning that we had a fairly easy time of deciding where to eat. With some trepidation we asked the front desk of our hotel for advice about where we should get dinner, because lately we've gotten bad advice from them. To be accurate, we got bad directions from them. The woman behind the front desk dug around in one of the three-ring binders behind the counter and fished out directions to Jerry's Seafood (9364 Lanham-Severn Road; Lanham, MD, 20706; phone 301-577-0333; fax 301-577-5926), which happened to be as few exits …
Earlier this evening, one of my cow-orkers and I decided to try a restaurant a bit closer to our hotel. Off and on all last week, we kept seeing the Bombay Masala (8825 Greenbelt Road; Greenbelt, MD 20770; phone 301-552-1600) in a nearby strip mall, but hadn't had a chance to pay it a visit for dinner or lunch, partially due to the size of the group that usually went. But, this was one of those nights in which everybody else was off doing something different, so deciding where to go was a simple matter.
Earlier this year, pen-testers hired by the Internal Revenue Service attempted a time-worn attack as part of their assignment: They phoned up 102 people who work at an IRS office while pretending to be tech support and asked them for their usernames. The people called were also asked if they could temporarily change their passwords to something simple (love? sex? secret? god?) as part of a troubleshooting effort.
Recently, an experiment was performed at Stanford in which children aged 3 to 5 were presented with various foods (including vegetables and milk, which a vanishing number of kids like anyway at that age), some wrapped in McDonald's packaging, and some in plain packaging. The children were asked to state which tasted better to them after trying the foods. Somehow unsurprisingly, they liked the foods that they thought were from McDonald's better, which says a lot for conditioning to particular images as well as the power of suggestion. People start assimilating ideas presented by advertising at an extremely young age …
If you've read my website for any length of time, you're probably aware of the fact that I am very much a privacy advocate - I think that it is none of anyone's business what you search for on the Net, what you read, or where you go. Furthermore, it is also a closely held belief of mine that so long as you aren't bothering anyone, aren't causing trouble, and aren't doing anything to anyone of legal age in your country of residence that's hurting anyone (or if it is, it's consensual and has been negotiated for in advance), it is …
Here's a cute animation that steampunks out there will get a kick out of. There are gentlemanly disagreements, there are duels, and then there's going toe-to-toe in steam powered mecha for the hand of a woman of noble extraction.
I'm back in Maryland on week two of (possibly two, possibly three) of my field assignment. I'm in another hotel in the same general vicinity as before and approaching dead tired after a long weekend of hot weather, running around, and pulling all nighters of one sort or another. I was running rather late today because I had a number of errands to run, which I took care of before starting the laundry, but now it's academic because it all worked out. Thankfully, the headache and aftermath of heatstroke last night went away while I slept, so I woke up …
