furtive explorations

Thus, the new Church slogan is "Hating our beloved alien masters for over 10 years!" and the footer of the "letterhead" reads: "Isn't 7000 years of alien oppresion enough? Cast off your shackles and join the underground resistence with moxy! Sure the aliens LOOK cute but you can't let them trick you, kid. You have nothing to lose but your self-respect, your sanity, your delusions, and $35 a month in cable tv fees. Send a SASE to the address above for more information on how you can fight back."

Now you just watch, this joke will get me in more trouble. I'll wind up having to write a massive free-form rant on aliens and cable tv and how the early cola wars dragged Moxy Cola down and why getting angry is your only hope. =)

• We Are Some Kind of Fat made me laugh.
• Blogdex intrigues me.
• Mariah makes me want to thank god for volume controls. Did you know if you turn the volume all the way down she gets more attractive? Audio can effect your vision. Eyes watering from pain, etc...

• ...that aliens walk among us every day.
• ...that you should say p'diddle and punch someone when you see a burned out head light.
• ...that mutations can happen after the zygote develops.
• ...that evolution isn't an everyday thing, that it is an event or only happens every few thousand years.
• ...that if time travel is possible you wouldn't wind up inside a star a half a billion miles away because you forgot the entire galaxy is rotating.
• ...that Gary Coleman is part of the Illuminati.
• ...that there is an Illuminati at all.
• ...that soda water tastes good by itself.

The next add will be Mystic for Hire which is off to an astounding start with gorgeous flash based comics. Only a month old and MWF means now is the time to jump on board. Fresh comics, ahoy!

You have no idea how bad I've been wanting to post to this blog. Isnt' that sad? And what is sadder is that I coulda been posting to Blogger all along since it wasn't down but I didn't even think about that until I got everything working. Ain't that sad? I was so broken hearted to be off the air my brain stopped working.

And worst of all, right as I got it all working I find out my Uncle had a heart attack so now the fun edge of getting it all working is kinda gone. He's OK, they did angioplasty and put in a stint so he'll be up and making trouble in no time but it sure is scary.

Anyway, I'm just going to lean back and watch the e-mail flow in so have fun and I'll post at you laters...

• Special Relativistic Time Dilation As A Cause Of Geriatric Southern Migrations In The Northern Hemisphere is way too funny. Read it.
• In Memory of Frank Willison is burning up the blogger lists for a good reason. A smart, funny man gets one last shot at making you smile and think. Every quote on the page is a gem.
• AbiWord 0.9 is out. I gotta try that bugger again. I sure hate Word, anyway you slice it. I still miss MacWriteII from the eldritch days of computing. WYSIWYG editing clean, simple, fast and useful. It did 90% of what you needed without ever a hassle.
• Get With The Program is a sad, sad piece of journalism. Yet Another Web Language wobbles onto the scene. Programming in CURL won't ever excite anyone. The more I looked at it the more I hated it and I like Scheme, C++, Perl, Python, C, and Java. I don't even despise JavaScript anymore. Yet CURL raises my YAWL hackles faster than any other recently proposed or rolled out language. Feh.
• Errr... OKaaaay. Here are the first 9 words on the page: "Zetacreations; Animal Dildos; The Customer appreciation page is up" I haven't dared look further...
• Jail Time in the Digital Age says what I would have said, only without any real fervor or cuss words. Things have gotten way outta whack when the US repressively jails a Russian Programmer for talking openly about how stuff works.
• The Most Wanted Painting is a weird concept. I think of lot of the art was sorta driven by the artists and not by the data tho. I'm pretty sure that six squares of obnoxious colors isn't nearly the worst 9 o 10 diverse cultures can think of.
• Droid Arena has ANYONE actually played this? Is it any good? Could their website suck more? All of these questions remain unanswered for now...

Would you pay someone to hold on to your keys for you and help you use them? Would you pay them a bit extra to make sure the same key works on every lock you might ever use and to show everyone who's lock you open what your key looks like? Try and pick a few passwords and spread em around. Change them every so often. Keep a card with your favorite few in your wallet and a real safe place (like a safe). If you lose the one card, start changing them. No biggie. Just don't give the whole key ring to everyone who comes along.

(Update 30 seconds later) New bad human trick "Smug Blind Munching": Right after posting something you think is funny, continue to watch blogger load while accidentally eating a handfull of burnt-to-a-crisp popcorn *spit* *spit* And what is worse is there are customers over my shoulder staring at me from the conference room so I had to suck most of it down. No spitting burnt food on the NOC console when being watched. I'm pretty sure that is one of those "unwritten marketing laws" the execs are always babbling about. =)

The worst part is I wanted to chatter about SharkTank Redemption which you can see on TV rather than on the now-saturated-with-ads iFilm site. Fricking funny and way insider, it is the story of two agency flacks who "must get busy living or get busy faxing" They must have watched The Shawshank Redemption about as many times as my roommate and I put together because they hit every nail on the head. Epic.

I'm sure there were other things I wanted to rant about but it was crushed under 5 hours of reading every linux related piece of paper I had looking for that exact commandline trick that would give me read/write access to my damn configs. I coulda found it in 5 minutes... if I had been online or if any of my friends would have been awake at 3am to ask. =)

Marvel at an excellently crafted joke! See innocent people duped! Hear evil corporate fuck-heads laugh hysterically! Watch smoke come out of the judge's ears as these people actually try to argue this in court!

I mean...c'mon people...can't we just solve this intelligently? Couldn't she have just taken the toy and shoved it up the manager's ass? Couldn't she have just super-glued all of his doors and windows shut on both his car and his house? Jeezy Creesy, I can understand she'd be mad after being the biggest bump-n-grinder of all the flusies in the region...but can't she at least be original about her revenge?

Here is a screen capture of my desktop modified to show you sorta what it looks like. The problem with the overlay technique is you can't get a screenshot from windows, it thinks the background is all pink or black or white. So I did a quick "demo" in photoshop. (I miss GIMP when I'm at work) Check it out and see how cool it is. Now imagine me working in telnet windows that are white text on black. My whole screen is basically animated except the words. Lovely! Of course, all the black text in windows is swirly but that is the price you pay to be hip.

Oh yeah, if you are looking at the icons you might notice that my drive names are "ataraxia" and "adipose". Guess which one is NTFS and which is the old FAT32 drive? I was sooo tempted to link ataraxia thusly.

Today, a federal judge in Newark will hear defense motions to throw out evidence gathered by a controversial new law enforcement technology: a system that recorded every keystroke typed on Mr. Scarfo's computer, including the password that investigators used to unscramble Mr. Scarfo's files. That wrinkle in the case makes the United States v. Scarfo the latest battleground in a growing struggle to determine the proper balance between the government's ability to conduct surveillance and a citizen's right to privacy. The next question, how roughly did he stroke those keys? Is there an assult charge still coming? Property Damage is a crime, isn't it? Seriously, a keyboard tap is no different than a microphone tap. It is indescriminate recording of communication and activity.

They also assert that the technology is like a wiretap, and that therefore the relatively difficult process of obtaining an electronic communications wiretap order, known in law enforcement as a "Title III" order, should have been followed, instead of the more basic search warrant procedure. Mr. Scarfo's lawyers have demanded full technical details of the key logger system. Hmm, I guess you know already which side of this I fall on...

The assistant United States attorney on the case, Ronald D. Wigler, said in his court response to Mr. Scarfo that the technology was used in full compliance with the law. In the brief, he refused to discuss technical details of the "sensitive law enforcement technique," saying that to do so would tip the hand of law enforcement in future cases. Mr. Wigler also said that the system did not record any e-mail communications and so the requirements for a wiretap warrant did not apply: "Letters do not become `electronic communications' subject to Title III merely because they happen to have been typed on a computer." Counterclaim: ICQ or AIM, Web bullitin boards, and websites ... Direct speech over keyboard.

But most powerful technologies, like automobiles, "have mixed effects on society," [Philip R. Zimmermann, creator of PGP] said. "The fact that criminals use cars doesn't mean that the rest of us shouldn't have cars." What more can I add to that?