After much deliberation we've decided to name him Pigpen, after the Peanuts character. Pigpen seems to enjoy making quite a mess in his cage, from throwing everything that isn't nailed down around to kicking his food dish off of the top level of the cage. He also likes kicking bedding between the bars.
We're still trying to figure out how he produces more mass in poo than food eaten.
As if that weren't enough we've also caught him teaching himself to climb the bars of his cage and trying to headbutt the door open. It figures that we'd have a …
One of the many buzzwords that you hear in the discipline of software engineering is metrics. They're supposed to be a measure of how effectively your coders are functioning based upon how many lines of code they write a day, how many bugs they make (for some value of 'bug'), how reusable their code is, how much money per line of code your project is burning through, or some other arcane measurement. The numbers are generated through techniques that appear to have more in common with gematria than with engineering and make managers salivate with glee (or rabies). The theory …
Does anyone else find it amusing that a cast metal and plastic drum is manufactured by a company called Touch the Earth? This is about as far away from their ideal as you can get without hopping a space shuttle.
Attention secret societies: you're really doing it wrong if your handbook wound up at Barnes and Noble.
Mist rising off the river near the Kennedy Center after a few days of rain.
A selection of four-resistor sound sequencers built on breadboards. Toward the end of the night we had a veritable symphony of beeps and boops sounding through HacDC
You only need three people to make a blue box if you're standing around bored - two whistling at the proper pitches to make DTMF tones and a third to whistle in-band signaling tones. Finding someplace to whistle to is a bit trickier.
(Thanks, Lyssa and Jade! Anybody got an oscilloscope we can borrow?)
It's been six hours since I got back from Shmoocon, and I'm still readjusting to a low information density environment. Shmoocon is DC's premiere hacker con, held early every February by a security research outfit called the Shmoo Group, which seems to have an odd interest in moose (judging by the repeating moose motif all over the place, from the free stickers to the laser cut acrylic convention badges). I've wanted to go for a couple of years but various and sundry things kept me from attending, so when I finally was able to score a ticket I jumped at …
For unknown reasons, I just lost the previous draft of this post, and so have had to start over. That includes a number of edits that made the text more coherent to read. Please bear wth me.
The reason I haven't been writing much lately is because what little time I have that isn't taken up by work has been spent running hither and yon, having what are popularly termed 'wacky adventures'. Things haven't slowed down much for Lyssa and I since we got married; in fact it's rare that we have an evening at home to ourselves that isn't …