Right now, it's de rigeur for people on the Net to make fun of the ingominous death of the Reverend Gary Aldridge, who was found dead in his home this past Sunday. Because the details in the news report may not be safe for work, I'm going to put the rest of this article behind a cut... It seems that the good Reverend, a buddy of Jerry Fallwell's, had a thing for rubber (he was found wearing not one but two wetsuits), self-bondage, and autoerotic asphyxia, and when he was found dead it seems that the ligature around his neck …
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 …
Last night Lyssa, Orthaevelve, and I decided to go out to dinner to celebrate things looking up at work these days after work. It was something of a snap decision, you see - I got a call from my boss while I was at the Metro station headed for home, and immediately told Lyssa as soon as she arrived. After going to the doctor's office so that she could get her weekly allergy inoculation, we called up Orthaevelve and asked about the wherabouts of any good Chinese restaurants in the area. Much to our surprise, there …
I don't have a lot of time right now, so I'll give everyone the highlights:
Lyssa and I got back from Pennsylvania around 0000 EST5EDT this morning. Grandma Pat's funeral went smoothly, the wake was small (as wakes go) and reasonably uneventful. I wound up sleeping through most of it because I was still dead tired from driving all Friday night up to Pennsylvania after work, got up early to get ready and dressed, and attend the memorial service. We left around 1845 EST5EDT on Saturday night and, after driving through one of the nastiest rainstorms to hit the tri-state …
About four years ago, a retired professor emeritus from the University of Pittsburgh named Bernhardt Lieberman was doing research on the hacker subculture. He interviewed a number of people in Pittsburgh (myself included at the time), and in 2004 attended the HOPE conference to interview another group of attendees about their lives, practices, education, and interests (computers and hacking aside).
I kept in touch with Bernhardt up until I left Pittsburgh in 2005, at which time I didn't have a net.connection for a couple of months. Life being what it is, I didn't actually get around to contacting him …
The literary world is diminished somewhat <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/308ee984-e8e9-11db-a162-000b5df10621.html".with the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, whose works were rife with social commentary and lines that gave conservative high school English teachers fits since the publication of Slaughterhouse Five, the story of a war veteran whose timeline comes loose and snarls itself around parts of history that it wouldn't otherwise be touching.
Vonnegut got his start in journalism, but wound up writing fiction when it didn't pan out in Chicago in the late 1940's. His early stories didn't get much press time but were …
