Never been one to let the carrier drop

in reference to that linked entry earlier..

P. says she doesn’t remember asking me to post. I have full motion video memory of her, in the last few days, saying I should post more, with the implication being (to me, anyway..) about our recent problems.

Which doesn’t, of course, mean it happened.

One of the annoying things about having experienced things that weren’t really happening once, is that after that, you’re never quite sure of your senses. Once you’ve had one really vivid, really beleivable hallucination, you can never know for sure if what you’re seeing, or remembering, is live, or memorex. Can I prove that it really happened, just because I remember it? No..

P. also commented that I shouldn’t be worried about J.’s decision to shuffle off this mortal coil because he had problems that I don’t. Well, possibly, but how can I know? I tried to tactfully ask L. why he chose to die – but she didn’t answer, which could mean many things – A: tact is not my strong suit, B: she missed the question, C: was too painful to think about (can’t blame her there..) D: she didn’t know or E: something else altogeathers.

P.’s third comment (or actually her second, I’m addressing her second two comments in reverse order.. from memory, so we’ll see if there are any massive discrepencies in my understanding of them.. the nice thing about computers is they’re very consistant..) .. anyway, P.’s second comment which I’m addressing third was that the passive-aggressive thing was more or less a tossed off comment.

Well, okay, to explain further. Me posting links to misc. mental disorders does not mean that I’m convinced I have them. It means I’m trying them on for size. My (mythical? since I like to pretend they aren’t there when I’m writing..) readers can comment ‘yep, that one’s you to a T’ or ‘No, that one has nothing to do with you’..

I saw a bit of myself in both the description of a passive-aggressive and the description of

Of course, maybe we all have a little bit of every disorder in us, and it’s only when one becomes dominant that it’s a serious problem.

It occurs to me that I wasn’t nearly sympathetic enough when D. was in the position I’m in now. (or have I been using V. to refer to h*? I don’t remember.. oh well, my old friends will all know who I’m talking about anyway). Now that the shoe is on the other foot and I’m the one remembering things that didn’t happen according to my SO, I realize how downright disturbing it is..

On the other hand, P. has also spoken a number of times lately of having a poor memory.. [which is strange, because she can apparently hold a matrix of several thousand ‘classic’ english titles in her head, to say nothing of assorted sea-bird facts, appointments, and who she needs to talk to about what.. I think what she means is she has a selectively poor memory, or there are some facts which don’t save well. I can relate – my memory is selectively poor as well. I guess we’re just not all built to store any arbitrary type of data you might choose to throw at us..]

I’m still waiting for my friend to arrive from the airport.. I should have woken up later, obviously.. 😉

Maybe I’ll go take a nap.

S.

I should probably mention that I actually rather *like* two-semitone transposes. But it’s still fscking funny..

Musicians, you will find this one funny. The rest of you can just ignore it.

Truck Driver’s Gear Change

If any of you have accounts on gateway, they should still work on the new iteration.

And.. {sigh of releif} ..

[root@gateway lists]# df
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 4127076 147656 3769776 4% /
none 192292 0 192292 0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda2 12096756 3576228 7906044 32% /usr
/dev/sda1 15385852 352572 14251720 3% /var
/dev/sda2 192251992 17187412 165298668 10% /home

That’s feeling a whole lot less cramped.

Some part of me is tempted to be bummed that /home is already 10% full, but that’s being a bit silly.

I wonder if I’ll regret not creating a partition for /usr/local, it also has a tendancy to grow without bounds.. but I did leave lots of extra space on the system disk unpartitioned, so if it becomes neccesary, I’ll be able to do it.

This computer case is slick beyond words. It has nifty changing colored lights on the front of it, and 4 5.25 bays, each one filled with a hot-swap fan cooled chassis. And a thermometer, which informs me that my system’s core temp is currently 93.4 – which really isn’t that bad, all things considered

I noticed a odd line through a user as I was browsing, and when I clicked on it, I got a message about how the user had 30 days to mark their journal undeleted or it would be nuked.

And I’m very dissapointed, to tell the truth – I kinda hoped LJ would hold onto content indefinately. I mean, disk is cheap enough..

I wonder if there’s any easy way to download a backup copy of my journal. Not that there’s anything that important here, but just..

Can’t sleep.

http://www.mentalhealth.com/dis1/p21-pe03.html

Yikes.

S.

All of you who are whining about the RPC worm, you really ought to stop.

Do you have any idea how much damage the author of that worm _could_ have done?

The government keeps telling us that we live in a dangerous world, where terrorists could come from anywhere. And I don’t doubt that the world’s a dangerous place, especially when you’re a citizen of the U.S.

They hate us because we have freedom? Yes, well, they hate us because we enslave them, but I suppose if you turn that on it’s head you can get the other.

No, seriously, I seriously contemplated buying a new motherboard because I couldn’t work up the energy to swap in a spare.

Then I realized, what am I _nuts_?

Maybe we should start labelling products with what the workers were paid.

Or maybe by how many hours went into it.

You know, I kind of like that. Just, a honesty check kind of tag. Just so you knew..

Of course, then you have to figure out how to account for increasing levels of skill. Or new creativity brought in by youth. Or..

How the heck do you put a honest price on something?

Anyway, I digressed. Back to the RPC worm.

Okay, so if the fix had gone through ‘channels’, would anyone have been patched?

What could have happened there? What digital evil could have sorted its way through all our disks, sniffing for interesting tidbits of data like bank accounts and collecting them, or wiping our hard drives..

Instead, what he chose to do was not only harmless, it pointed out very clearly which boxes were responsable. Even more so after ‘Mr. Billy Gates’ (sorry, don’t remember his name at the moment) added a message box to the effect of, ‘Microsoft Screwed The Pooch In A Fundamental Way’.

(by the way, I wonder how Gates feels about being called Billy by the worm that gave lie to the phrase, ‘Microsoft Software Is Secure’. RPC! A hole in RPC! It just doesn’t GET any more _owned_ than that. Yah, I’m sure RPC runs as a non-priv’d user in microsoft land. Uh, yah, right, betcha it’s part of the kernel or something..

Come to think of it, why does name resolution or scanning the network for new hosts block?

But, returning to the rant at hand, if the government is trying to save our society from terrorism, what about the informational kind? The author of the worm saved us from a real terrorist – one with not-so-benign motives. Imagine every hard drive wiped twelve hours after ten hosts had been infected and confirmed.. Or even two hosts.

Imagine a worm that mutated. By itself, not with human help, using all those computers.. hella good entropy there, really. All those sound cards, keyboards, sources of random noise. And computers are so fast nowadays, all you’d need would be a sandbox and some genetic algorythms.

No, wait, that’s science fiction.

But, seriously, you could make a worm that would wait until it knew two, or three, or whatever other new hosts were infected – not hosts already carrying, and then self-destructed..

You could even have a small percentage be ‘sleeper cells’. Infect them, but then just hide yourself using some DLL tricks or by patching the kernel or something..

The list of evil things you _could_ do with a known security hole is endless. If we’re really to be so afraid, shouldn’t we be afraid of that. I promise you, taking out every w2k machine that’s connected to a network would cost some lives.

————————-

I hate seeing things two ways.

Seeing them three ways is even worse.

Makes it so hard to know which the right way is, which the best way, which way will get me the furthest in the directions I want to go.

————————–

Why do I have so much trouble with lj-cut text=?

Probably because I don’t enter enough things here.

http://www.pornresource.com/

No, really, it’s a web site for people who want to get into the (now rather oversaturated) porn industry. Tired of paying the middleman, porn artists? Go into business for yourself!

Okay, I don’t know why this strikes me as so funny. Maybe one of the most interesting and beautiful things about the internet is that no matter what you’re into, you can find other people that are into it. (IO bet there ar ea lot more people into running porn sites than there are into developing EVs, somehow..)

It’s a network with a message. Well, two, really. The first one is: You are not alone. No matter what kinky sex things you’re into, what bizarro hobbies, what strange obsessions, what conspiricy theories, what causes, what political views.. you’re not alone. There are others out there. Feel better.

The second message is: Pay up. Now. Be spammed to death. Buy porn. Buy drugs that will never work. Buy more computers. Buy. buy. Buy! Capitolism rules! Really..

Somnehow I find it ironic that something as fundamentally communistic as the internet is so.. well, you know.

STill working on editing down the track I recorded with Ron a few weeks ago. 90 minutes is a LOT of audio..

Other than that, just been workin’ on PHP stuff for How.. I’m behind, as always.. should try and get that done and working tonight. but I’m out of disk space, so I need to delete some more assorted stuff – or, the RAID controller came, but the new version of the firmware doesn’t like my oldish m/b – it’s a plot, I tell you – so I’m thinking of going to PC Club and getting a new motherboard.. or perhaps just trying it with another m/b that I have lying around here.

Seattle mercifully has been staying sunny – of course, the down side of that is that I feel like I’m being cooked.. oh well, it’s a price I’ll happily pay.

Till next time,

S.

The list of things to do grows ever longer. The list of things I *must* get done today already has like three entries, and it’s barely noon.

I suppose one definition ofa good weekend is any that you have trouble getting out of bed after.. 😉

We did two days of Bumbershoot this year – bumbershoot, for the uninitiated, is Seattle’s music festival – which, unlike other music festivals, truly does have something for everything. I can’t even remember all the bands we saw – to say nothing of the mechnical printing press, poetry readings, one reel film festival (that was truly great – I could have sat in there all four days except that then I would have missed too many bands)..

Well, what can I say? Bumbershoot is a experience unto itself and next year I’ll try and make it to three days worth of it. I think if I went to all four I would suffer from sensory overload or something.

Or perhaps just really, really tired feet.

Anyway, Bumbershoot is one of those things taht makes me feel really lucky to live in Seattle – which, aside from the weather is the most wonderful city in the U.S. without a doubt – (or perhaps that’s because of the weather – maybe Seattlites feel the need to overcompensate or something?)

There was a woman yesterday wearing a shirt that said ‘musicians, ask me about weed’. I never did get the chance to – we were getting ready to sit down for the REM show, and there were not a lot of places to sit. (By the way, REM was in top form last night, and sang many of their favorites along with many from the new album that are soon-to-be-favorites I predict [if clearchannel will ever put them in rotation]))

Of course, with ten million P2P users, perhaps ClearChannel doesn’t have the control they used to.

Saw another interesting band which I would describe as a cross between information society and the B52s – United States of Electronica. Not even remotely electronica, but still, lots and lots of fun and I highly reccomend catching a show if you liked 80s music.

Well, enough blathering on about my wonderful weekend. I’m sure you all ahd wonderful weekends – after all, isn’t that what the holidays are for?..

To work.. [sigh]..

I’ve been noticing that in sheer.us’s statistics page, there’s rather a unusually large number of unlikely referrers.. things like

3 148 2.12% http://mature-mature.net
4 142 2.04% http://free-cumshot.org
5 142 2.04% http://mature-movie.net
6 139 1.99% http://nude-mature.net
7 139 1.99% http://voyeur-web.ws
8 138 1.98% http://anal-sex-picture.org
9 138 1.98% http://big-tit-picture.org
10 138 1.98% http://cum-shot-cumshot.net
11 137 1.97% http://free-big-tit.net
12 137 1.97% http://mature-gallery.biz
13 137 1.97% http://mature-woman-x.com
14 136 1.95% http://big-tit-movie.net
15 136 1.95% http://cumshot-picture.net
16 136 1.95% http://facial-cumshot-x.com
17 136 1.95% http://free-voyeur.info
18 136 1.95% http://mature-sex-x.net
19 136 1.95% http://upskirt-video.net

Finally it occured to me what is going on here – people have figured out that web pages with links to their webalyzer stats are being search-engine crawled, and so they are adding these entries in order to increase their search engine footprint.

Well, screw that. 😉

I can see a well-placed robots.txt file is in order here – I don’t particularly want to help porn sites increase their web footprint.

S.