As someone who grew up watching adults go crazy over ideas like rules, ownership, and other non-tangible concepts where consequence did not match the "excitement" given to it, I always thought it was so bizarre how some really important things would just get brushed off like they didn't matter, even when attention was brought to it.

In particular, this was (meh, still IS) true with computer security. Not just electronic machines, but any system put in place to "protect" something where people would just rely on what they were told (or assumed) and not think twice about it. Oh, they'd lock all their doors, buy guns, and watch highlights of human depravity on the evening news, but put the equivalent of a plastic zip tie around sensitive data or switches to manipulate things pertaining directly to the real world.

Even after all this time has passed, and people are generally wiser about security thanks to rampant identity theft (thank you, weak social authentication schemes!), we get some pretty boneheaded negligence in high-ranking positions like this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/5745124/MI6-chiefs-cover-is-blown-by-wifes-holiday-snaps-on-Facebook.html

This gives me the ultimate forehead-smack of WhyTF can't these people, or the people who enable them to get there, not have a clue of what it means to keep sensitive materials sensitive. Reminds me of how nation-states would view an "enemy" like Kevin Mitnick, who was put in federal prison for 4.5 years PRE-TRIAL, 8 months of that in solitary confinement because law enforcement officials convinced a judge he could start a nuclear war by whistling into a payphone (not making this up). This happens while real enemies laugh at how stupid all of his "victims" (no one was hurt, and no owners were deprived of property) were and have a field day with the US military's information technologies.

Despite all that, things "seem" to be getting more prevalent in the public consciousness. Obama has his "cyber security" deal that sounds hopeful. I still get little moments of worry like when I recently talked to a financial institution I deal with and I was able to request a change of address and a check with no authentication. I even brought this up to the lady and she seemed to think this was more funny than serious. guh.

Not one, but TWO A/B-26 aircraft flew about 1,000' (I *want* to say less) over my house (only slightly to the north) tonight! They sound AWESOME! I'm patiently hoping another will fly over so I can snatch a video of it.

wikipedia article about them here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-26_Marauder

how badly I've wanted one of these since I heard the faintest whisper about it



heh

heheh

ha!

BWAHAHAHAHA!

True story: my calves are both pretty sore from learning how to moonwalk over the past three days. Once you train your brain, the actual moves are not really that hard and I'll get better with practice. I think I could teach it to people easily too.

Some are just "natural" with the talent though:

When I hear the words "treat her like a woman" - the first things that come to mind are Tom Jones, taking her out to dinner, and commenting on one of many things I appreciate.

NYPD cop Joel Witriol, badge #942838, must think something completely different.

of all the many famous celebrities that have died in the past week, I make no apologies for feeling a special sense of loss for Michael. His music was everywhere when I was a kid, and it made my outlook on the world so positive. All the "urban" cultural images and provocative lyrics I didn't quite understand really opened my eyes to the wider world around me.

Hearing the inevitable tasteless remarks about him after his death just inspire me to be awesome, heal the world, and rock his music in my mind that much harder and remember how intensely he could own his performance and make it cool to let your freak flag fly (until just after black+white by most anthropologists' views). He made the world a better place in one night than the naysayers could ever hope to in their lifetimes.

As for how I feel about his death, roast beef in the bottom left panel of today's achewood strip says it very concisely. The whole strip is a proper tribute and well worth reading.

I'd ask anyone to imagine being at this and not remember it changing their lives:


I would also highly suggest a read of Ray Smuckles' Essay on Michael Jackson's Passing

A snippet from that:

The Cure is just out there, like car horns or people who make noise when they cry. The Cure is a choice. When we hear Michael, it is not a choice to feel the beat. It is not a choice to cock your head and straighten all the fingers on your right hand.

Starting at 11:28 pm, the neighbors have been running a jet ski on a trailer in their driveway out of water, for the first minute at a good throttle too (making a nice cloud of smoke). It's just been idling for the past six minutes and I wonder if they're going to kill it before going to bed.

WWHRD?

When I heard that Mach-mood Ah-ma-deena-jahd won the Iranian presidential election "by a landslide", I was pretty sure that the results were rigged. There have been a lot of other indicators prior to the election that this was not going to be fair, and that only seems more evident with Mahmoud's attitude toward the THOUSANDS of angry protestors now in their 2nd day of serious revolt. He's very dismissive of any opposition in a weak attempt at orwellian alteration of reality, saying essentially "don't worry, the police will have this cleaned up in a jiffy".

I still the he gets wrongly misquoted on that whole "wipe israel off the map" remark. The literal translation was more, "erase them from the pages of time" as though to assert their illegitimacy as a state. Even for a figurehead with little actual power, I (and a huge portion of the Iranian population from what it looks like) think he's doing them a major disservice, and I think he would serve much better to take on civil engineering duties. At least something where he's not speaking on behalf of so many people who do not agree with him.

researching how to spell his name correctly... Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

I was delighted to see gov. Schwarzenegger announce a transition to electronic textbooks for math and science high school students to save on money. WHAT AMAZING INSIGHT! When one can casually obtain enough college textbooks to represent a luxury sedan's worth of book fees within a few hours then maybe it makes sense to stop robbing people of all the money it takes to produce/make/transport/stock/sell/resell/update books the traditional way. And with book-on-demand publishing services, it's not like the concept disposes of hardcopy materials either.

Universities and public schools should just license the books they require of their students, (optionally) print up-to-date editions, then collect them at the end and include it with the cost of tuition. It's one of those things that just makes too much sense to be happening already, but I'm glad at least someone in a high profile place can get started with it.

It's come to my county. A 17-year-old girl has it in Broward county, and an 11-year-old boy has it here:
http://www.miamiherald.com/854/story/1027383.html

Mexico City launches massive vaccination campaign against swine flu

MEXICO CITY, April 24 (Xinhua) -- The government of Mexico City is launching a massive vaccination campaign throughout the city against swine flu, which has possibly killed 45 people and infected 943 nationwide.

The Mexican government confirmed on Friday the outbreak of the swine flu, and warned people to avoid crowds.

"It's a virus which mutated from pigs and transmitted to some human," Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova told Televisa television.

Health officials are now investigating the possible deaths and infections caused by the virus. Virus samples have been sent to laboratories in Canada for testing, they said.

The government also decided to close all schools in Mexico City and the center of the country to avoid spreading of the virus.

The World Health Organization, which has identified swine influenza as a potential source of a human flu pandemic, has also activated its global epidemic operations center.

I just did something nice - I bought a 4-week subscription to the news-press paper (dead tree media woo!) to help a middle school guy go to the Kennedy Space Center. His brother was there too, along with a requisite adult supervisor. And get this, their cousin (before they were born) was on board the Challenger!

Those guys were nice, and I thought the whole exchange was really fun. Plus the news-press is a pretty good paper, particularly since I've been finding myself much more interested in local happenings as of recent.

How is this guy smart enough to put clothes on, let alone be on the House Energy and Commerce Committee? He even tweeted, "I seemed [sic] to have baffled the Energy Sec with basic question - Where does oil come from?"



Update: I looked at his youtube page. Not only is he on the committee, he is "the highest ranking Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee".

wOw... just wow.

This always aggravates me any time I see it, and it's extremely distracting that this is happening right behind my house where I can hear it. The new neighbors are watering their already-green-as-hell lawn in the middle of the day.

update: I went over and introduced myself as the neighbor and all that. I considered that they were just testing things out for fine tuning, and that was indeed the case. They're pretty nice people, infinitely moreso than the loud, angry, and apparently negligent people that were foreclosed upon.

This morning the power went out at an extremely inconvenient time for three hours. Crews had just installed a new pole, little more than a full block from my house, with some rather elaborate wiring going all through it. After only a few days a massive bald eagle flew up in it, shorted something making a transformer explode (along with mr. eagle's head), and causing the downed line to burn and everything.



Even 30 minutes after the incident, this bit of transformer was burning quite well.


I took a movie of that.

Fun Fact: In January, a man was shot in the chest just up the street from where this photo was taken. I even saw one of the suspects get apprehended. I'd link the article, but the news-press expects you to BUY it. Haven't newspapers learned anything from the NYtimes paid access mistake? ah-Ha! the daily breeze comes to the rescue:
http://www.cape-coral-daily-breeze.com/page/content.detail/id/501670.html

I haven't had a good laptop for some years now. My last one was a 1st-gen powerbook g4, with the titanium-aluminum alloy shell. Pretty good design, but right during the advent of wifi when they quickly discovered how that material works like a shield to microwaves. To make wireless signals work at all, they have little plastic "windows" up top where the antennae are. Later plastic intel macbooks get much better reception in comparison. I had it for a good long time, and it served me well in many different places. I finally sold it to pay rent, and was glad to have parted with it at that stage in its lifecycle.

So now I have this dell mini 9, and I'm going to put mac os x "leopard" on it. It cost about a quarter of what that one did new, and it has very nice specs. As I'm writing this, the installation disk image is copying to an 8G usb thumb drive (it's wafer thin), which took me some time to figure out. I still don't know if it will work properly when I'll be doing the initial attempt. All the guides I've read expect you to have another mac around the house, which I don't. But I just think between windows and linux (simultaneously on the same physical machine) I should be able to make it work.

After some extensive googling, I came up with this: using dmg2img (windows), I create a proper hfs+ disk image that I can use with dd to image the usb thumb drive as though it were the install dvd. If I was really good, I'd also have the boot image on the same drive, but I'm going to try having that on a separate thumb drive and using them both at the same time.

There is a special boot image used to load the leopard disk. macs use EFI instead of the pc's long-standing traditional bios, and this helps bridge that difference. My favorite computer firmware interface is still Sun's OpenBoot, which uses the Forth language to interact with (which is really fun!). In a perfect world, all pc's would have that.

Well, thing is still copying, so I'll finish up the boot drive in windows land while dd is copying in linuxville. I'll be completely stoked if this works on my first try.

Edit: Well, I really do need another mac around (for disk utilities) to make this work the way I'd like. Having purchased the retail cd, I should get it to work if I can find a dvd drive that it works with. The only one I have here doesn't :( Tomorrow I'm going to the local pc store to ask if they have a stack of old dvd rom drives I can try out.

I think I had heard some things from him before that made me think he was not a bad guy. The range of my opinions on his songs could only go as low as "tolerable".

Listening to him being interviewed by Terry Gross, he strikes me as an unapologetically awesome guy. He's laid down such gems as (paraphrasing) "If I hear it, it's mine. I don't care if shakespeare wrote it or I heard it a sitcom" and "I only have four different songs". Very modest, down to earth, and aware of reality.

In my rant I overlooked an interesting idea - why not give all that auto bailout money to an AMERICAN car company that has ALREADY presold out of every car they've made and has a "road ready" sedan coming out. They've been plagued by people issues in their operation, technical challenges, and having to provide a temporary transmission just to get the things into owners' hands. And they're still in business despite these hardships. If you think it sounds too good to be true, you haven't been following Tesla Motors over the past few years.

A picture of the car and stories here:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/4/1/715595/-Tesla-Motors:-The-company-we-SHOULD-give-Billions-to-UPDATEDx2

Dell is taking an extra week to send my mini-9. I could be frustrated about it, but it's a proper moment to embrace my own tardiness in delivering productivity.

And I have to mini-rant on the impending GM failure. Every time I hear another argument in favor of propping it up, I just want it to fail more. Paraphrasing something I heard on NPR (Have you donated yet?), "GM isn't making money because Americans aren't making enough money to buy GM cars."

Suggestion: Cry out a bloody river, place a buoyant pricetag on it, and the speculative investments alone will bail out the economy!

Something I've been told a lot in the past decade is that my familiarity with computoasters is due to my being born at the right time. To which I proudly reply, bullcrap! and (uh-oh, sub mini-rant) go off about how my first computer was a vcr blinking 12:00 and adult types (not parents) had a mentality about wanting to block me from "nice things" like books that were "too advanced" and such as that. Not all the time... I had a neat experience with real recognition in second grade public school, but it got cut short :/ (not trying to be a negative nancy, bear with me)

No, no, no... it's all about the mentality of wanting to understand your environment and embrace your surroundings to make what you can out of what is available. If the stupid car companies can't compete in today's market, especially after making such brilliant strategies as capitalizing on bush's suv discount program (smells like greed to me) and having the insight to believe that it would last forever in a world hungry for energy, then...

(a very impolite word) 'EM

The problem, I think, is that people cannot begin to imagine a decentralized operation that continues to support gm vehicles and parts in the event of their, uh, collapse. Their best paid workers would likely get recruited within the industry, and their designs and assets would be reallocated to places where they would probably be put into use (by people who do jobs). I'm not under any illusion that this wouldn't be a major upheaval with massive changes, putting some in desperate situations. All I can say is... social programs?

What I see are people clucking about like if GM fails, their cars and gas stations are going to P00f! disappear overnight or something.

Serves 'em right for screwing over the buggy whip industry. I lost sympathy for them a long time ago for all the loud, pushy commercials that play whatever famous song for 15 seconds and make it sound like the best deal evar is going to be gone forevar if you don't buy now.

I haven't seen spiderman 3, but I'm always willing to watch any piece of crap Sam Raimi makes. I can't pick favorites, but he's certainly one of those filmmakers who can move me with cinema in a way that is rarely achieved.

warning: the following link contains scenes of intense spookiness

Having just watched the trailer for Drag Me to Hell, I'm kind of excited to see how he does a proper horror flick at this stage in his career. Looks pretty good!