Category: family fun

The mass-mailing MyDoom virus has become the fastest spreading program to date and the damage could continue for months or years.
[ . . . ]
When opened, the virus installs a stealth program on the victim’s computer that opens up a software “back door.” Attackers can then bypass the PC’s security and turn the system into a bounce point, or proxy, for any network-based attack.
[ . . . ]
The virus has programmed infected PCs to send data to the SCO Group’s Web server between Feb. 1 and Feb. 12.

So what if SCO, litigious as they seem to be, decided to sue MSFT for any costs associated with the DoS attack, since MSFT operating systems’ well-known security issues made it possible? I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they tried to get PC owners names from ISPs, based on the source addresses of the packets, forged or not. But one target looms larger than any other . . . . .

[Posted with ecto]

I decided to give up on ads on the home page of this weblog: I realized the content was too varied to allow any hope of targeting anything useful. So that cleaned things up a little bit.

Now, with any luck, the ads that do appear on the archive pages will be relevant.

My click-through to impression ratio look better than usual so far today, so it might be helping.

[Posted with ecto]

I got out on the road today for my first mileage of 2004, about 4-5 miles around the neighborhood. I have been wanting to try the new pedals and shoes I got a couple of weeks back, and today worked out to be the day. About 50 degrees, no rain, no wind, no sun either . . . .

Getting into the pedals wasn’t too hard: it took me a few iterations before I worked out just where on my shoe the cleat is . . .

It was a weird experience being locked in like that. I could pull with more power, and perhaps that’s what was different: instead of getting power only on downstrokes, I was able to pull on the upstrokes. So that’s what this spinning business is all about.

Good thing I don’t have any mileage goals this year. I’m looking at events more than miles, to keep the fun in this without making it a drudge.

now playing: I Can’t Give Back The Love I Feel For You from the album Beckology (Disc 2) by Jeff Beck

As threatened/predicted, we got a good dumping of snow: four inches here at Thistle Dew and environs, so some sledding was on for this morning (two excursions before lunchtime).

Schools are closed and I’ll be surprised if they re-open tomorrow. The snow was supposed to turn to rain at midday, but instead it intensified, then just stopped, with no change in the temperature. So it’s just staying as it was.

Highs are projected for the mid-40s tomorrow, though, so rain or not, our winter wonderland may be down the drain by the weekend.

Electrolite: Nailing the “Information Please” fifth column.

They’re missing a bet though. If they think the stuff in almanacs is bad they should take a look at tourist guidebooks.

The important part, as I realized this morning, is that — like most English words begining with “al” — “almanac” is an Arabic word. “Encyclopedia,” “map,” and “tourist guidebook” are not.

So what’s a good english/american word we can use to refer to these books instead of an obviously dangerous Arabic one?

Bush in 30 Seconds

I hope these all get some airplay . . . . .

Om Malik on Social Nets

The point is this whole trend of social networking. Whether it is Tribe.net, Friendster, or LinkedIn, they are banking on one little aspect – we would share our rolodex, and build up a network of our own, and of course somehow more links would be formed.

[ . . . ]

The question I have is: why the F**K should I share my network of contacts with these commercial entities. They are like BlogSpot that does nothing for my brand equity and in many ways chews me out after making the network connections. Thus what I want is a “MoveableType” of social networking. Blogs took off because it was about one person – me. My social networks should be of my making for me. Lets figure out a way to cut out the middlemen.

The deal killer for me is the requirement that we all give away our hard-won networks of colleagues and friends to a system that doesn’t preserve the nuances of how we manage those relationships. Some people you can call to shoot the breeze with and maybe spark off an idea, others you only call when you have the whole thing hashed out. Others you don’t call: they call you. I haven’t seen a social network website that allows you to sort your contacts this way.

And the other aspect of this is that the people worth networking with are not in these networks: the website services are optimistically hoping that they’ll build sufficient critical mass that Steve Jobs or John Doerr signs up as a member. As if either of them needs an introduction . . . . .

The NYT has published a detailed how-to for converting vinyl LPs to MP3s or CDs. When Napster started, it solved two distinct problems. The obvious one was that you might not have the CD handy that you wanted to listen to (either because you hadn’t bought it or because you’d left it somewhere else, i.e., at your parents’ place while you went to college), but the more subtle one was that ripping CDs used to be really hard. You needed specialied software, tons of hard-drive space, and you had to title all those tracks by hand.

Eh, I don’t remember this part of it: I just dropped CDs into any cddb-aware (now gracenote) ripper and it was all done, unless I was the first person ever to rip that particular disc.

But the part that tied my tail in a knot was this:

(80% of the music ever recorded isn’t available for sale — if you want to hear the song on that groovy LP through your iPod’s headphones, you’re gonna have to get ripping).

Have I mentioned the idea of the RIAA could make a ton of money by re-releasing all the stuff in their vaults in mp3 or some other digital format?

The death of Horatio Alger

When Business Week, hardly a bastion of leftist thought, runs a piece exploring the the shrinking middle class, concluding that “America looks more and more like a class-ridden society,” you have to wonder . . . .

Suppose that you actually liked a caste society, and you were seeking ways to use your control of the government to further entrench the advantages of the haves against the have-nots. What would you do?

One thing you would definitely do is get rid of the estate tax, so that large fortunes can be passed on to the next generation. More broadly, you would seek to reduce tax rates both on corporate profits and on unearned income such as dividends and capital gains, so that those with large accumulated or inherited wealth could more easily accumulate even more. You’d also try to create tax shelters mainly useful for the rich. And more broadly still, you’d try to reduce tax rates on people with high incomes, shifting the burden to the payroll tax and other revenue sources that bear most heavily on people with lower incomes.

Meanwhile, on the spending side, you’d cut back on healthcare for the poor, on the quality of public education and on state aid for higher education. This would make it more difficult for people with low incomes to climb out of their difficulties and acquire the education essential to upward mobility in the modern economy.

And just to close off as many routes to upward mobility as possible, you’d do everything possible to break the power of unions, and you’d privatize government functions so that well-paid civil servants could be replaced with poorly paid private employees.

It all sounds sort of familiar, doesn’t it?

What amazes me about this is the self-deception that goes on: people who yearn for the kind of life-changing wealth their heroes flaunt will fight against any redistribution that will equalize the playing field for them. They hope to be at the top of the heap themselves one day and so argue against redistribution of wealth from the folks at the top, but they don’t realize they’ll never get there themselves if they keep paying a disproportionate share of the tab.

94.9 KUOW: Seattle’s NPR News and Information Station

Two-time Booker Prize winning writer Peter Carey has a knack for transporting the reader into a slice of history, even though Carey is a novelist. Carey’s last book, The True History of the Kelly Gang, was a set of imagined letters written by a real life Australian folk hero. In his new novel, My Life as a Fake, Carey starts with the true story of a literary hoax and creates a modern Frankenstein story. When the editor of a small poetry journal encounters exiled Australian poet Christopher Chubb in a grimy Malaysian bicycle shop, she’s drawn into his story of how a fictitious poet Chubb created became real and ruined Chubb’s life.

If this show is made available via streaming media, I’ll update this with a link: it was really good.

<UPDATE>here it is.

I just read this book and liked it, though as the interviewer said, it goes along pretty quickly. The story turns out to be a page turner and I was done before I was ready to be . . . .

What I found interesting about the conversation was how his books start. He has an idea, and just plays with and builds on it, without regard for if the book will be Literature or more accessible fare. (In fact there was a joke in the program about a book that was praised for its scholarship, it’s insights, everything about it, except it was too accessible: snobbery pops up everywhere).

I have read almost everything of Carey‘s (I never finished “Kelly Gang” as it was depressing me) and he defies any categorization. His books are set in modern times, Victorian times, on the Australian frontier (the Kelly book could be considered a Western but the skill of the writer makes it a different kind of Western entirely: more genre-busting), and even some touches of “magical realism.”

And the Ern Malley story is dear to my heart, as well.