The town of El Mirage, Arizona is in a state of shock right now because it was discovered that 12-year old Casey Price, a shy and relatively quiet seventh grade student was actually 29-year old Neil Rodreick III, a convicted sex offender and child molester posing as a twelve-year old. More's the point, his three male 'relatives' were also sex offenders who'd crept into the area. Rodreick used cosmetics and a shaving regemin to enhance his slight build and short stature to appear to be a preteen kid in the local school system. As far as they know, none of …
Just when you thought attacks couldn't get any more oblique, along come Sebastian Krahmer and George Ou, who figured out how to use Vista's audio playback and voice recognition systems to compromise a box. It started off with Krahmer musing on the Dailydave list about whether or not it would be possible to craft a recording of someone reciting voice commands that could be picked up by Vista Speech Command running on the same box through a plugged in microphone. George Ou took the idea and ran with it, and came up with a couple of .wav files that do …
Well, it's the first day of 2007. Somehow, we all survived another year, a little bit older, a little bit wiser, and a little bit more jaded. The point is, though, that we made it. Last night, everyone started arriving at our apartment around 1930 EST/EDT. I drove out to pick up Hummingwolf from the Metro station and then headed back to make sure that everything was running smoothly back home. Lyssa had been slow-cooking a ham in the new …
Lyssa pointed me at an article that brought up something that never occurred to me - how libraries manage the limited amount of space they have for all of their materials. This is to say, they keep track of how often each book is checked out (much easier to do since card catalogues and patron records went digital in the mid 1990's) and if it isn't touched for longer than a certain time, they either throw the books out (dumpster diving at the local library is how I got most of my books when …
Here's a cloud to find a silver lining in - research into technically nonlethal virobiological weapons. Technically - known side effects were coma and death from brain swelling, but at least some of the time the usual effects were similiar to that of a bad case of the flu. This research never got off the ground because of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention of 1972, but serious work was still done at the time.
As part of my New Year's resolution to get in better shape I've started to work out twice a week, and discovered once again that my body isn't as young as I wish it was. It's been two days now, and most of the major muscle groups are firing off error messages as fast as they possibly can because they've put in a lot more duty time than they're accustomed to doing for a professional geek. I still can't walk without pain for long periods of time, and let me tell you, maneuvering in this state with a rather heavy …
Today's the fifth of January - the TARDIS is supposed to be ready at the body shop by now. Cross your fingers, everyone.
thunderbird -ProfileManager - For when you absolutely, positively have to do things to your e-mail configuration that would make any sane system administrator (hush, you!) cringe. Laptop users take note: SanDisk is going to unveil its next generation storage drives at CES next week, namely, 32GB flash drives for portable computers. The drives are built using solid-state flash technology, which means no moving parts (and thus, lower power requirements). For a while they've been available for certain applications outside …
1128 EST/EDT. Lyssa and I made it into Cleveland, Ohio around 0155 EST/EDT this morning (five minutes within projected arrival time!) The Ferrett is running a Doctor Who marathon today, and Lyssa and I made the long drive to Ohio from DC to join everyone. Some of us have been fans for a while, some of us are new to the series (like Ian, sitting on the floor across the room watching Rose from season 27).
First things first, but not necessarily in that order.. I left work early yesterday afternoon so that I could pick up my …
