[Most Recent Entries] [Calendar View] [Friends]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Albatross' Blurty:
| Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 | |
| 9:53 am | Everything breaks
It started when my spouse opened a spam e-mail and infected her computer with a virus. I extracted the virus, but the process damaged the operating system and I can't find my OS disk to fix it. Every fifteen minutes or so it BSOD's and continues cycling through BSOD screens and back to the O/S until it's shut down. Then her Flash audio driver failed, so she can't watch YouTube with Internet Explorer or Firefox. Interestingly, she can still do so using Safari. In the midst of that, the XBox 360 started displaying the fatal Red Ring of Death, meaning that despite drastic efforts to prevent overheating the CPU chip finally developed a microscopic crack in one of its input lines. Yesterday was pretty sucky. There were a couple of positive notes. I did GO on the bike ride, so I got some exercise even if I was in a blue funk. I managed to visit the doctor for a cholesterol test and pick up my cholesterol pills at the pharmacy just as I ran out at home. That was a tricky logistical stunt to pull off, but I managed it. I also, finally, at about 10:30 p.m., got a minute or two to play with my new digital photo frame, and that was really exciting. Very rarely does one come across a device that does exactly what you'd want it to do if you thought about it. So as I wondered about the features of the new picture frame, they emerged on display: clock and calendar function, music and video functions, and integrated musical slideshow. I loaded it up with some recent trip photos and my best-of gallery and brought it to work today. I even managed to bore a hole in its stand and connect a security cable, so it won't walk off from my desk! So yesterday was sucky, but today, today I have hopes for. And my spouse's computer? I decided to just buy a cheap replacement through a discount program at my workplace. I could spend days fixing her old computer, or put in a few extra hours at work and cover the expense that way. Next... purchasing a digital camera! Stay tuned... |
| Monday, August 4th, 2008 | |
| 8:04 am | Seventeen
Oh my. Where the hell did the time go? Last night as a pre-birthday-present torture we forced the twins (Dante scarpered to the basement) to view their ultrasound videos which continue along through the fourth month after their birth. They were appalled and very deliberately bored, but it was amazing for me. Not because of my skinny, bushy-bearded appearance, or the fact that my wife's parents were practically the same age then as I am now. No, it was just that I have no idea where the time went. It feels like no time - and yet it feels like forever. ( Read more... ) |
| Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 | |
| 4:44 pm | CBS News Standards
However, these bloggers with complaints are referencing an out-of-date set of standards. Since I has mad investigative skillz, I have unearthed a copy of the current journalistic standards that CBS employs. It is clear upon reviewing these standards that CBS did nothing wrong whatsoever. ( Read more... ) |
| 4:44 pm | CBS News Standards
However, these bloggers with complains are referencing an out-of-date set of standards. Since I has mad investigative skillz, I have unearthed a copy of the current journalistic standards that CBS and other news agencies employ. It is clear upon reviewing these standards that CBS did nothing wrong whatsoever. ( Read more... ) |
| Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 | |
| 10:56 am | Another poster
So of course when I'm under all of this pressure, I focus like a laser on the tasks at hand, I dedicate my self to the unrelenting pursuit of quality, I invest all my... ...Okay, I get distracted and create de-motivational posters. Here's the latest. The poster is emblematic of what I deal with in the information security field. This morning a pen-tester was showing our group that he'd discovered a hole in a newly developed, not yet released application so large that it allowed him to intercept all communications between a customer and the server. He could step into the middle of the communication and take over completely: if a product was sold on the server for $10, he could change the price to $12. The customer wouldn't know the price wasn't $12, that what he'd see and he'd pay it - the server wouldn't know the customer had paid $12, because the pentester could take out the $2 for himself, and send the $10 along to the server. Everyone would be happy - the customer would get the product, the server would make the sale, and the pentester would walk away $2 richer. Meanwhile the majority of effort in the organization is to squelch the findings, remove the ability of the pentesters to examine the application, and assign blame to other parties. Hence the poster. I took me fifteen minutes to find the image and create the poster. Time well spent, I say! |
| Monday, July 14th, 2008 | |
| 11:28 pm | Convergence Booklist
I am very happy that I have figured out this tool, as this gives me the opportunity to undertake another of my endless, partially-completed projects, that of inventorying all of my books on my blog, as well as listing what I am presently reading. As a matter of fact, let's do that now... ( Read more... ) |
| Saturday, July 12th, 2008 | |
| 11:20 am | Facebook Summer I've been spending my blogging-time playing with Facebook, which for some reason has not yet been added to the prohibited list on the firewall at work. When I need to distract myself from productive work, Facebook is there. Meanwhile it only took half the summer, but we finally got our summer schedule figured out. In order to save money (for next year's double-college) we're taking two extended weekends, and the resulting series of four-day work-weeks will hopefully help me retain my sanity at work. ( Read more... ) |
| Thursday, June 19th, 2008 | |
| 10:38 pm | Joe Sodd III
He died a few miles away, in a quiet neighborhood wedged in between the freeway and a couple of colleges, while riding his moped home from giving a dance performance. Joe Sodd III was minding his own business when someone, for reasons unknown, decided to stab him to death. I didn't know Joe Sodd III terribly well (grandson of the Minnesota PGA Hall of Fame player). When he worked as a waiter at a local restaurant, he had served my wife and I dinner. But as the Star Tribune points out, he was a gifted young man with lots to offer the world. I cannot fathom his parent's grief, nor do I wish to try. Just thinking about it makes my head spin. The Star Tribune did a service by posting a video that shows some of this young man's accomplishments. There are any number of web tributes to Joe by his peers, which show how many people cared about him, and how much he will be missed. The Sodd's have lived down the block from us for the seventeen years that we've lived in this house, and it is my deep regret that I did not get to know their son better. He was a student at Marcy Holmes school, and the photo above is eight years old now, with Joe in the center, from a production of 'Bye By e Birdie.' There will be a memorial for Joe on Sunday at the Triple Rock Social Club which is very close to where he was killed. |
| Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 | |
| 8:42 am | Addendum and poster Apparently I was too quick to post, yesterday. It took til this morning, but KSTP has posted the article along with the video of the crazy St. Francis councilman which caught my attention while flipping channels. So now you can watch and judge for yourself, although as I mentioned in a discussion with my friend Tim, you CAN count on the media to edit the interview in order to get 100% pure uncut China White craziness. Still, it doesn't appear that it took a lot of editing.
And WHY am I focusing my life on entering various contests on the Bruce Schneier blog? Because it's about the only blog I can actually justify reading while I'm at work! Well, that, and I have no life. |
| Monday, June 9th, 2008 | |
| 10:22 pm | Whatsa Mater With St. Francis? St. Francis is my alma mater, I graduated from St. Francis high school, back in 19-mumble-mumble. At the time, St. Francis was a desolate little farm town, which thought nothing of investing in extra athletic facilities, but skimped on the educational funds. Call me biased, but when I grew up there, I thought I was surrounded by thugs and hicks and knuckle-draggers. I expressed this opinion in response to a story on the Star Tribune website, garnering a response from a friend of mine who has lived up there for the last couple of decades, assuring me that things have changed for the better. But some things never change. ( Read more... ) |
| Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 | |
| 3:50 pm | Happy Alberti Day! Hey y'all. I wanted to blog this yesterday, but I was too busy partying? Why? Because yesterday was "Alberti Day"! Alberti Day was named on behalf of the first Italian settler on Long Island. To put things in perspective, when this guy stepped off the boat, Columbus' discovery of America was not as old as the Civil War is to us now. Along those lines, my friend Giovanna has clued me into the fact that if you can trace your ancestry back to Italy, you can become an Italian citizen! And since my father's father was from Palermo, I have the opportunity to undertake the multi-year quest to gain Italian citizenship. This is no small thing! WIth such citizenship, I could get work in the European Union, and also I could own property in Italy. Here comes my Tuscan retirement villa! Gio has offered to help me out with this quest, with the caveat that she's moving to England in the fall in order to become an archaelologist. ( Read more... ) |
| Thursday, May 8th, 2008 | |
| 9:44 am | 180 Hours Hey y'all. I know and understand that you've stopped checking for updates here. I get it. Haven't updated in forever for two reasons. First, I started writing a big entry about online cameras, and it has stood in the way of subsequent posts. I'll finish it eventually, but I have to stop letting it clog up my other posts.
HOWEVER.... I wanted to post really quick to announce that I'm one of the finalists in noted security expert Bruce Schneier's Third Annual Movie Plot Threat Contest. Most government security programs are focused on what Schneier calls "movie plot threats," unlikely but flamboyant possible attacks. For example, ever since 9/11 we've been taking off our shoes and discarding our liquids at the airport in order to prevent another shoe bomber or liquid bomb attempt. Never mind that neither of those attempts worked, and one of them wasn't even real. The inconvenient and expensive measures aimed at preventing this very small group of possible attacks are usually unlikely to prevent them, to say nothing of preventing much more mundane and likely attacks (such as a bomb slipped onto the plane by cleaning crew). Anyway my entry this year was the DNA Adulteratometer, a small device that detects if someone has spit in your soup. It's meant to address the fear that someone has peed in the company coffee pot. More broadly, the fallacious entry addresses the insecurity and fear inherent in the growing class and ethnic divide between the (mostly white) ultra-rich and the (frequently ethnic) workers and servants upon whom they depend for their lifestyle. Be sure you visit Bruce Schneier's website, review all the entries, and then vote for mine! Everyone who does so receives a FREE DNA Adulteratometer, as soon as they are invented and manufactured... And be sure to purchase one of Bruce Schneier's fine security books while you're there. They make great Mother's Day gifts! |
| Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 | |
| 11:33 am | The Old Man Still Has It I gave up being a programmer over fifteen years ago. After about fifteen years spent programming, I realized that programmers are the 21st-century bricklayers, and that they will always be underfunded, overscheduled, and uncredited. Rather than building houses, I'd rather be the architect designing them. Plus I just couldn't wrap my head around object-oriented programming. Or if it was possible, I was by then so finished with programming that I couldn't get up the energy or interest to do it. But that doesn't mean I don't ever code. It just means I don't code very much. ( Read more... ) |
| Sunday, April 6th, 2008 | |
| 11:20 am | Weekend Oof Well, this is my first weekend off in a while. It's rather nice not having to work seven days a week for a change, although who knows how long it will last. At the beginning of March my boss asked me to put in more time at work. We had one of these conversations over electronic chat (meaning that I captured it for posterity): "how many hours are you burning per week?" "Well, I'm burning about 45." "is there anything preventing going up a little more? I am averaging 60" So I took the hint and started putting in more hours. Certainly there was plenty of work that needed doing. Still is. Fortunately this week some of my responsibilities were offloaded to another person. I could tell that in some senses this was viewed as some kind of "loss" for me, some kind of "win" for her. And within the corporate context of career employees, that's possibly true. Whenever I've been part of such "wins," however, they are usually transient and meaningless. For one week you might be celebrated as an exceptional employee, but I have never seen long-term accruing benefits from such endeavors. Instead one's manager leaves or the business reorganizes, or one changes jobs, and then one might as well have sat quietly in a corner as worked like a fool, the end result is the same. So I was happy to "lose" and hand some unwantd and unasked-for responsibilities off to the crazy person who stepped up for the job! What this change means, in addition to being able to relax on a weekend, or maybe even blog, is that I get to focus on the type of work I actually like doing and am skilled at. I'll probably still be called upon to work crazy hours, but at least I won't spend it, like I did last Sunday, fiddling with Microsoft Project and impossible milestones. ( Read more... ) |
| Monday, March 24th, 2008 | |
| 4:38 pm | Great ex-Spectacle-ations For the first time in a month I did not work over the weekend. Oh, I worked, but I didn't work on work-work, billing work. I just didn't have time. Friday night we went bowling with our friend Terry and his two sons, and one son's charming and outgoing girlfriend. It was my delight to bowl a 134 on the second game (after not having bowled for a zillion years). This was using a nicked up house bowling ball, so it was quite an accomplishment for me. At first I ran around in an annoying fashion trying to give my family members bowling tips. My spouse was challenged by the weight of the ball (you don't want to stand too close behind her) and my younger son has a remarkable delivery that involves a series of breakdance moves. My older boy got quite exasperated with my advice very quickly. So I stopped giving him any advice and he bowled a bunch of gutterballs, Now, I'm not one to indulge in schadenfreude, but he wins at everything. Halo, Fluxx, Elixir, all sorts of games, we play, he wins... so it was fun for his old man to thoroughly out-bowl him. Not that I'd ever SAY that out loud... :-) ( Read more... ) |
| Monday, March 17th, 2008 | |
| 2:56 pm | Oh Danny Boy Gosh and begorah, 'tis St. Patty's Day, and I without a stitch o' th' green t'wear... Greetings everyone, I'm back from a busy three or so weeks of soul-crushing depression interspersed with actual fun. I'm happy to report that the Writing Retreat was a fabulous success. Tam arrived on Thursday night and slept on our couch since her brother was out of town. We stopped at Tobies on our way to the cabin, where both Tam and Mary agreed that their caramel rolls are way too big. Then we headed off into northern Wisconsin, finding the cabin without too much difficulty. The difficulty was that the half-mile driveway was completely snowed-in! Fortunately the neighbor's driveway was plowed, so we nervously parked in their lot and then trudged our stuff across to the cabin, leaving an apologetic note on the car window. The cabin was ridiculously cold, and we had to start everything up from scratch - the drained water pipes had to be refilled, the water heater started, the heat activated throughout the house.
|
| Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 | |
| 12:58 pm | Hangin' wit my Pepys
Anyway I subscribed to the MPR "Writer's Almanac" podcast in the hopes that I would be inspired to remember my writing on a more regular basis (and lookit, I'm blogging!) And earlier this week he reported on the birthday of Samuel Pepys (pronounced "peeps" for some reason). It turns out that Pepys was a blogger! Granted, his blog was written on paper in a quaint format called a "diary," had an uncertain audience called "posterity," and racked up even fewer page-views than MY blog for its first few decades. Nevertheless, it has many of the characteristics of a blog. It's as much fun as The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. ( Read more... ) |
| Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 | |
| 9:33 pm | I also yell at the TV
"like all previous hominids and more than 99 percent of all species that have lived on Earth, humans will probably go extinct, and it will likely happen sooner than a billion years" This sentence really jumped out at me, making as it did a billion-year long-jump off of a couple of extremely shaky assumptions. So, of course, being an opinionated bastard, I promptly wrote to the article's author... ( Read more... ) |
| Monday, February 25th, 2008 | |
| 10:29 am | Sometimes Stuff Works Out
This weekend was no different. My Biology course called for two lengthy lab exercises to be carried out - lab exercises that required days of preparation beforehand, and days of execution thereafter (one of the labs is a fermentation lab). The only problem was, I needed to work on my job over the weekend. ( Read more... ) |
| Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 | |
| 2:04 pm | Well Worth a Little Coughing...
It's Saturday, and I'm lying in bed in the afternoon feeling miserable. My spouse is off at a writing class. My chest feels like I'm gargling hot glass, and my head feels like a kernel of popcorn about to pop. I make the mistake of breathing, and erupt in phlegmy hacking. When I can hear again, The Boy calls up from the steps up to the attic bedroom. ( Read more... ) |
Hey y'all. Life and work continue to conspire to consume my time and leave me only crumbs with which to work, but I've managed to assemble my 
Second reason is that I'm in the middle of my third consecutive 60 hour work-week. Things at work have gotten totally crazy, so I simply haven't had time to post (or to bathe, for that matter - I'm pretty ripe!)
Garrison Keillor turned me on to 
I was reading an article entitled 
Oh yeah, I wanted to mention this when I was talking about my recent cold...