Last week, at a summit featuring such noted nutrition experts as SpongeBob SquarePants and Jared the Subway sandwich guy, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill that forbids public schools from selling sodas.
— The Center for Consumer Freedom, 9/21/2005Topless, lifeless
I want to like Page3.com. Viewing attractive young women who are wearing little or no clothing is a hobby of mine, one I’m unlikely to give up any time soon. And, indeed, some of the pictures work just fine for me: pretty girl, nice smile, healthy body, real breasts, no piercings, few or no visible tattoos.
Most of the time, though, I find myself wondering if I’m looking at a woman or a RealDoll. The blank stare! The static pose! The aftermarket accessories! It’s like those giant inflatable liquor bottles: great advertising but no substance.
Live Munitions!
The most popular content from munitions.com is now back online: my large photo archive, consisting mostly of fully-clothed Playboy models. It’s in serious need of a complete overhaul, including rescanning every image to get rid of the worst mistakes that my flaky LS-2000 inflicted, but it’s back.
Of course, the whole collection was apparently posted to Usenet again last week, and I’m sure that a bunch of the pictures are being fraudulently sold on eBay this week, either as “real prints from the negative” or “copyright-free image CDs.” This, however, is their home, and having it back online makes it easier for me to file copyright infringement claims with ISPs.
Annoying habits
/dev/audio: Breathless, The Corrs
Next to my casually-held belief that Bush actually won the election — something that I’ve thought of as a dead issue for quite a while now (and hooboy, how wrong I was!) — I think my worst habit is a certain selective deafness when it comes to music.
No, not the part about listening to utter crap, although I do that, too. See the song mentioned above? It’s been playing on repeat for more than six hours today. Just the one song.
I didn’t notice. It’s a nice song, but is it that good? No, it just falls into that category of music that fills the background pleasantly without ever attracting my attention.
I have a large collection of such songs, although obviously I could get by with one or two. This repetition isn’t usually a problem, since I live alone, but I’ve heard some grumbling when it happens at the office, and it was once taken as a planned insult by my college roommate’s live-in girlfriend. She simply couldn’t believe that someone could play Debbie Gibson’s Out of the Blue album for seven hours straight without noticing, and she was sure I knew that she hated it.
The funny thing was that I hadn’t realized she was in the apartment in the first place.
Sanitizing Apache with PF
About 45 minutes elapsed between the moment that I first turned this server on and the arrival of the first virus/worm/hacker probes. It was obvious that most of them were looking for Windows-based web servers, so they were harmless to me.
Still, I like to review the logs occasionally, and the sheer volume of this crap was getting annoying. Later, when I raised munitions.com from the dead, I discovered that it was getting more than 30,000 hits a day for a file containing the word “ok”. Worst of all, as I prepare to restore my photo archives, I know that I can’t afford to pay for the bandwidth while they’re slurped up by every search engine, cache site, obsessive collector, Usenet reposter, and eBay scammer on the planet.
Enter PF, the OpenBSD packet filter.
Unrepentant sinner
Undergrads love free Internet porn. This is not news. Undergrads will go to great lengths to hide their porn collections from the sysadmins. This also is not news. Sometimes they outsmart themselves. This is just plain fun.
Pissing in your whiskey
Han shot first.
We never saw Newt’s family.
There was no World War II scene.
The government agents had guns.
Think of your favorite movies, the way you remember them. Pick them up on DVD, and there’s a disturbingly high chance that the movie you see will be different somehow. Maybe it’s subtle, adding a few minutes here and there that were originally chopped out for runtime or ratings issues. Maybe it’s dramatic, restoring huge chunks of material that were arbitrarily slashed away by a clueless studio. More and more often, though, it’s the result of a director revisiting his earlier work and simply changing his mind about how best to tell the story.
I call this “pissing in your whiskey,” because the director is insisting that the best work he could do ten years ago has soured in the barrel, and needs an infusion of mature creative juices.
Sometimes it's not the network
My job was Unix support for Corporate Services, which basically referred to everything in the company that wasn’t related to developing, selling, or training customers how to use our products. In practice, though, it usually just meant MIS, because HR and Legal were composed entirely of Mac people, who had their own support team.
The oddest exception started one day when an HR manager asked me to help him set up a beta-test of a Lotus Notes-based applicant tracking system. The application was being developed on OS/2 servers and PC clients, but we wanted to test it with a SunOS server and Mac clients, since that’s what we had.
Backups? What backups?
A.J. was worried. For several months, he’d been growing more and more concerned about the reliability of the Unix server backup system that he operated every day. He was just the latest in a long string of junior contractors paid to change tapes, but he actually cared about doing a good job, and something wasn’t right.
He had raised his concerns with the manager of Core Services and the Senior System Administrators who were responsible for the corporate infrastructure, but they assured him that any problems were only temporary, and that he should wait until they had the new system in place. A.J. resigned himself to pretending to do his job, and grudgingly agreed to stall for more time whenever a restore was requested that he couldn’t accomplish.
And then the system just stopped working.
