Wow

2006 f295 Pinhole Photography Wall Calendar by tom persinger (Calendar) in Calendars > Photography:

f295 The International Pinhole Photography Discussion Forum has just released a full color wall calendar for the year 2006. Celebrating a year of “pinhole photography” it features the work of more than 25 photographers from around the world. Many diverse locations are represented including; Australia, Belgium, The Czech Republic, Russia, Spain, The United States and many others. The photographs range in style and format. The calendar includes selections in color, black and white, alt-process, and polaroid.

That is all.

The [tarnished] buckle of the Bible Belt

Atlanta always wanted to be world-class city, another New York, when we lived there. I expect some people knew it would come with a cost but I wonder if even they think this is worth it?

Yuck:

ATLANTA (Reuters) – In a sleazy hotel room, “Brittany,” then aged 16 and drugged into oblivion, waited for the men to arrive. Her pimps sent as many as 17 clients an evening through the door.

A “john” could even pre-book the pretty young blonde for $1,000 a night, sometimes flying in and then flying out from a nearby airport.None of this happened in Bangkok or Costa Rica, places that have become synonymous with sex tourism and underage sex.

It took place in Atlanta, the buckle of the U.S. Bible Belt, where the world’s busiest passenger airport provides a cheaper, more convenient and safer underage sex destination for men seeking girls as young as 10.

“Men fly in, are met by pimps, have sex with a 14-year-old for lunch, and get home in time for dinner with the family,” said Sanford Jones, the chief juvenile judge of Fulton County, Georgia.

A new federal law passed in 2003 ensures that American sex tourists landing on foreign soil and hiring prostitutes under the age of 18 can get 30 years in prison.

But in Georgia, punishment for pimping or soliciting sex with a girl under 18 is only five to 20 years, according to Deborah Espy, the Deputy District Attorney of Fulton County.

Add your own thoughts about sanctimony, hypocrisy, etc in comments.

creaky

The update to 10.4.6 may not have gone as badly as I thought. There are rumors that permissions cleanup tasks make the install take longer. To my mind it was just hung. Got to a message about IPv6 and then just stopped.

So I reverted back to 10.4 and ran the massive updaters overnight. After a slow login this morning, all seems well, though for reasons I can’t make out, I got no email. I usually have 20-30 pieces in the inbox and a bunch more filtered out. Only the filtered email was delivered.

Boy howdy, does it use some memory: after a fresh reboot this AM, it still needed a Gb of swap space to buttress the 640Mb onboard.

white:~ paul$ du -hc /var/vm/
1.0G    /var/vm/
1.0G    total

Knowing what I know now, I would have waited or skipped this upgrade. 

annoyances

  1. OS X 10.4.6 was released today via System Update. It rendered my iBook unbootable. I could boot into single user, or to the install media, but it would hang during boot. So now I am back to 10.4 with a lot of patches/upgrades to catch up on. None of the other (newer) systems were messed up.
  2. My WRT54G router is supposedly expandable with sooper kewl firmware hacks, none of which seem to even install. One of the features of linux I came to loathe was the need to fork a new version at the slightest opportunity. So how many version of linux-based firmware are there for this? I have found half a dozen so far. At some point I have to wonder if these features are worth the trouble it takes, free software or no.

On the upside, it looks like I have WPA security working so I can dispense with my localhost-forwarding-ssh-over-an-encryptedtunnel-thingie.

boys in long trousers, and a dose of snark

The cultural reference in the title? The explanation is that once upon a time, boys wore shorts until a Certain Age, at which they were considered mature enough (not sure what age that was) to wear long pants, as befitting arrival at Man’s Estate. I’m guessing 16 or so, the common school leaving age Back In The Day.

The estimable Lance Mannion weighs in on the Depends-wearing militia:

Lance Mannion: A rhetoric of cowardice and vanity:

Right Wing bloggers have felt a duty to scare the beejeebers out of the rest of us. Now, a lot of them were quaking in their boots themselves and were desperate to prove that their own terror ought to be shared by all of America. And a lot of them have managed to scare themselves, like Cub Scouts telling ghost stories around a camp fire.

But I think all of them, just like the Cub Scouts, enjoy being scared.

They enjoy it because after they’re done giving themselves goose bumps, they get to defy their own fear. They get to be brave.

They can scare themselves silly and then immediately start swaggering around as they’ve just walked up to a fe-fi-foing, grinding Englishman’s bones to make his bread giant and spit in his eye.

To live in fear as if the possibility of another terrorist attack is the same as living under the hourly threat of one is a mark of cowardice.

But to say from the comfort of your radio studio back here in the United States to someone who is in Iraq at that very moment, essentially, “Hey, bub, don’t talk to me about danger! I’m the one knows from danger! I got your security problems right here!” isn’t just cowardice.

It’s conceit.

I never got into the “let’s go see a movie so we can wet ourselves” idea of fun: apparently some never grow out of it.

And I wish this were real: gotta be a spoof, but funny all the same.

To Bloggers from Borders @ AMERICAN DIGEST

the price of fame

There were some unfortunate side-effects to being linked from MAKE: I was unable to accommodate everyone, it seems.

I have a watchdog script that throttles the httpd process (shuts it down, actually) when load hits 5 or more. It then checks until it drops below 2 before restarting. For the better part of any hour, there was no web service to be had.

Apr  3 02:50:02 red root: Watchdog running: load of 6.11,
Apr  3 03:25:02 red root: Watchdog running: load of 5.38,
Apr  3 03:30:00 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
Apr  3 03:30:00 red root: Watchdog running: load of 6.28,
Apr  3 03:35:00 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
Apr  3 03:35:01 red root: Watchdog running: load of 7.87,
Apr  3 03:40:00 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
Apr  3 03:40:00 red root: Watchdog running: load of 8.79,
Apr  3 03:45:00 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
Apr  3 03:45:01 red root: Watchdog running: load of 9.55,
Apr  3 03:50:00 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
Apr  3 03:50:00 red root: Watchdog running: load of 10.68,
Apr  3 03:55:00 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
Apr  3 03:55:01 red root: Watchdog running: load of 10.83,
Apr  3 04:00:01 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
Apr  3 04:00:01 red root: Watchdog running: load of 12.20,
Apr  3 04:05:00 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
Apr  3 04:05:00 red root: Watchdog running: load of 19.49,
Apr  3 04:10:00 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting
Apr  3 04:10:00 red root: Watchdog running: load of 14.20,
Apr  3 04:15:00 red root: Watchdog checkfile detected: exiting

Sorry about that. I may need to look into some other mitigation strategies. Money helps, but that’s not forthcoming at the moment.

coming soon to a theater near you?

Schneier on Security: Announcing: Movie-Plot Threat Contest:

For a while now, I have been writing about our penchant for “movie-plot threats”: terrorist fears based on very specific attack scenarios. Terrorists with crop dusters, terrorists exploding baby carriages in subways, terrorists filling school buses with explosives — these are all movie-plot threats. They’re good for scaring people, but it’s just silly to build national security policy around them.

But if we’re going to worry about unlikely attacks, why can’t they be exciting and innovative ones? If Americans are going to be scared, shouldn’t they be scared of things that are really scary? “Blowing up the Super Bowl” is a movie plot to be sure, but it’s not a very good movie. Let’s kick this up a notch.

Continue reading “coming soon to a theater near you?”

Spring Cleaning, FreeCycle style

I have been giving away some stuff this week: the moderators of our local group put out a call to see more OFFERED listings. I obliged.

So I unloaded:

  • a two-seat wagon my kids have outgrown
  • a telescope
  • an old SCSI scanner
  • a sandbox

All spoken for or gone. Got a couple more things listed that are not meeting with any love, and a couple more to list when I get the particulars.

Continue reading “Spring Cleaning, FreeCycle style”