Hard to imagine someone would drop it out the window . . .
The next question is, do I want it? Like it’s still available.
Month: May 2006
spam
Still dealing with lots of spam, cleaned out a few hundred today via WordPress’s moderation tools and found hundreds more in the database.
Turns out they were coming in as trackbacks, against which there is no real defense except to disable them. Did that two ways: by turning off pingback/trackback in WordPress’s controls and moving the wp-trackback file.
My highest comment_ID is 31,649, while active comments only number 1974. Almost 31,000 spam comments, against less than 2000 real ones? Nice, real nice.
new pinhole images
Just got some new pictures back and I think this is the best of the lot.
Taken with the old Foldex pinholer on Fuji Velvia 100. I’m going to try negative film and see if that helps at all: the exposure latitude of slide film is perhaps not the best solution for pinhole experiments.
Flickr images of the rest of them are available. I am over the limit for my free sets and am not sure about the $25 for a Pro account. If you feel generous . . .
Why I read MAKE, online and on paper
AOJ Outdoors Tip – Eliminate Yellow Jackets With This Non-Toxic Homemade Yellow Jacket Trap!:
How It Works: The yellow jackets love fish and will begin to cut off small pieces to take back to the nest. In their “excitement” of buzzing around the bait a few will occasionally hit the water. The soap in the water breaks the surface tension of the waterproof coating on the yellow jacket and it instantly sinks in the water and drowns in a few seconds. Some yellow jackets will successfully haul a piece of meat back to the nest and tell all the other gatherers in the nest where this great food source is. Soon all the wasps from the nest will be working on this fish and over a period of time, all will eventually make mistakes and either fall off the fish and into the water or bump other wasps flying around and knock themselves in the drink, then its curtains for them too. It only takes a day or two to wipe out nearly every yellow jacket in your area.
Put the trap on a table or other high area outside so that kids and pets will not be able to get close to it. A piece of fish with vertical sides works best for having the insects fall off easier.
I knew or suspected yellow jackets liked fish but never thought of something like this.
Friday Random Ten
- Pretty / The Cranberries / Everybody Else Is Doing It, So Why Can’t We?
- Moral Kiosk / R.E.M. / Murmur
- The Scarlet Tide / Elvis Costello & The Imposters / The Delivery Man
- Starless / King Crimson / Frame By Frame [2 – 1972-4]
- Recoil / Magazine / Real Life
- Not The Girl You Think You Are / Crowded House / Recurring Dream
- Bright Future In Sales / Fountains Of Wayne / Welcome Interstate Managers
- I Believe / R.E.M. / Life’s Rich Pageant
- Satellite (Demo) / Elvis Costello / Spike Bonus Disc
- Symphony 6 – Beethoven / BBC Philharmonic conducted by Gianandrea Noseda / The Beethoven Experience – Downloads
bonus: You’re My Drug / The Dukes of Stratosphear / Chips from the Chocolate Fireball
it’s only money
A friend of a friend took her own life yesterday.
She had been caught/discovered embezzling funds from small businesses for which she worked as a bookkeeper and, for reasons known but to her, decided there was no other way to make amends.
It’s only money. Even if it couldn’t be repaid, it isn’t worth a life. No one would have asked for this as a punishment.
She was sitting in the room in which I write just six days ago, surrounded by a dozen friends, all sharing laughs and occasional shrieks as the wine flowed along with the conversation. Any one of them would have listened with a sympathetic ear.
This sounds angry, as if I am angry with the departed. And in truth, I am, a little. We have all been robbed of a friend and a chance to help, and over something as inconsequential as money.
Does this mean I condone stealing? Am I some kind of soft-on-crime liberal? Far from it: but I value people more than money.
I lost a friend many years ago in a similar way. She felt she had no other options, but the difference in her case was her health. She had survived debilitating cancers, twice, and when the third instance was found, she didn’t have the strength to go on nor did she want to be that helpless again. I can accept that, a medical-based decision, more readily.
new look for Spring
Time for a new look. I re-skinned the WordPress stuff with a little help from wpthemes.info.
I ran across Sandvox today and ran the top-level page, uninteresting as it is, through it.
Sandvox looks interesting, from what little I used it. It seems to do a pretty nice job at abstracting away all the icky html stuff. It also introduces a modular assembly idea with Pagelets, little stubs that be added or removed from the page as needed. Peeve: you can add a Flickr badge, but not yours. There’s one coded in and you have to remove/replace it with your own badge if you have one.
And unregistered users get a big yellow banner across the bottom of their one page announcing their cheapskate status š
But for all those petty niggles, it looks good, works well, worth a look.
And I got a reply/acknowledgment of my Flickr badge kvetch in less than an hour. Encouraging.
Now playing: Porrohman by Big Country from the album “The Crossing”
black or white?
The Apple Store (U.S.) – MacBook:
So the black comes with the larger drive, but all drives are 5400 RPM, rather than 4200. And all come with audio line-in, the snazzy MagSafe power connector . . . .
I’m sold. But by the time I can score one, who knows what they’ll have in them?
presented without comment
Winners’ Gallery: the Best of Contest 72:
Over/under on when signs like this actually start appearing in public: September 2006.
what does all this mean?
My God. This is turning into a twisted, 1984 version of the back story to the leak investigation on the now sadly defunct West Wing. Check out Russell Tice’s letter (.pdf), and the very strong hint that the matter to be disclosed involves military satellites being used to spy on Americans. It’s staggering if true. The specter of this whole architecture of futuristic warfare, being used to experimentally target the communications of the American citizenry, is profoundly disturbing.
Excerpt from the letter:
Under the provisions of the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act
(ICWPA) and in the absence of an official response from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), I intend to report to the Armed Services Committee probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while I was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency (NSA) and with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). These acts involve the Director of the National Security Agency, the U.S. Air Force Deputies Chief of Staff for Air and Space Operations, and the U.S. Secretary of Defense.These probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts were conducted via very highly
sensitive intelligence programs and operations known as Special Access Programs (SAP)s. I was a technical intelligence specialist dealing almost exclusively with SAP programs and operations at both NSA and DIA. U.S. Code, Title 10, Subtitle A, Part 1, Chapter 2, Subsection 119 (Special Access Program: Congressional Oversight), dated 12 July 2005 states that the Senate Armed Services Committee is responsible for reviewing “waved” [sic] SAP programs.
We got computers, we’re tapping phone lines
I know that ain’t allowed