I got in before the price went up from $75 to $150 for Shmoocon, an east coast nerd convention that I went to last year with Ben.

Anyone else going?

Another PKD story optioned by hollywood. Does this cast look crazy enough for you?

Keanu Reeves as Fred/Bob Arctor
Rory Cochrane as Freck
Robert Downey Jr. as Barris
Woody Harrelson as Luckman
Winona Ryder as Donna

I intentionally try to avoid any celebrity drama and even I am a bit scared of combining acidic Harrelson, Ryder, and Downy Jr. with a base Reeves. It just sounds too much like something in the Anarchist’s cookbook with four common things and one really hard to find thing that when combined will melt through an engine block. What’s the antithesis of a super-group?

Fred/Bob indeed.

But they will be happy to come get you from inside to show you something neat. Something neat like your car nestled nose-first into a grove of pine trees 15 feet from where it was parked. And then they’ll tell you unrelated very important jokes with no punch-line’s, or wander off to play with micro-machines.

When the car is started, after a hard crank to clockwise to unlock the ignition, the front and hatch windshield wipers will be on hi-speed, the hazard lights will be on, and the high beams and headlights will be on.

The 4 year old was completely unfazed / uninjured.

Please no kill-the-parents-or-kid plots, accidents can happen, and at 4, every little boy is trapped in the event horizon of accident-causation.

I’ll be reimbursed for damages and don’t care about the car so much. It’s the rental car I’ll hate.

Edit for clarity: No, he didn’t jump out in front of me, he went outside, climbed in the car, played for a while with stuff, ran through the gears with no clutch (yay) and eventually managed to find the combination of car-out-of-gear and released-e-brake. My car then slowly rolled into a row of pine trees. He got out, shut the door, came inside, waited for me to stop talking to a co-worker, then asked if I would go outside with him to see something.

Just finished The Cuckoo’s Egg. Pre-morris worm haxoring! The closest anything came to a mention of Redmond was a flippant reference to “DOS” about twice, amongst many other PC OS’s. Ben suggested it, good/fast read. Pre Chaos Club! Pre-BBS! NYT best seller, yadda-yadda.

PS: I love that amazon lists this: The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security by Steve Wozniak as if Woz wrote it. :woz: What a fucking terrible book. Er… FREE KEVIN…

Last week I was working for a fire alarm vendor fixing their VPN / redoing their firewall policy (Juniper Netscreen for those interested, with an LOL “[permit - permit] on the [untrust -> trust] chain”) in the same room that they test fire alarm equipment: the rest of the room is surrounded by wall-mounted circuit boards with das blinken-lightzen and wire leads running everywhere. This room contains all of the models the vendor installs I guess, ready for testing. Each device beeps evvery few seconds, for what reason I can’t even begin to guess.

The last time I was stuck in an environment with enough noise-polution that I recorded and posted it was my college roomate snoring.

These beeps got really old but I found that if I didn’t think about them (silly notion QUICk DON"T THIK ABOUT A PINK ELEPHANT!) they just disappeared into the background noise and I was able to focus just fine. Thank-you Play this as loud as possible on repeat for four hours. Yes, that’s XM top-tracks in the background, piped through the whole office. I complained about it to another tech enough that I know that in addition to the Credence (hate), I also was tortured with Billy Joel’s “Movin’ Out (anthony’s song)” (-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack shoot me) and STYX “Come Sail Away”.

BEEP.

Oh, and I type fast in the end.

Today we celebrate a day that is reliably predictable and observable - the autumnal equinox. Let us all share bad Falling-into-Fall jokes, remember our indian summers, our changing leaves, and share in a holiday that atheists, jews, christians, and muslims, asses and elephants, and rich and poor people would have to deny observation to disagree on!

:jihad: WINTER ADVISORTY LEVEL BROWN! REPORT SUSPICIOUS BAROMETER READINGS! BE SURE TO CARRY PARKAS, SUN SCREEN, AND DUCT TAPE – BE PREPARED! IF YOU LEAVE THE A/C ON IN THE FALL, THE SOUTHERN-HEMISPHERISTS WIN! :911:

(oh it was a nice post until it had to get all :tinfoil:)

The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security is getting a bit of attention lately. Some groups get it, some miss the point as expected.

I dig Marcus’ link to his own book:

My book has not sold very well!!
Why don’t you buy a copy?

The best nit picking refutation I’ve found (and can’t seem to find again) focuses on #4: Hacking is cool. If hacking is taken as a means of leveraging power by oppressed peoples, isn’t it cool? Abused by corporations or a government through technology? Learn to hack the technology and fight the man! This makes sense to me but again misses MJR’s point; the problem is the hype associated with criminal applications of hacking.

A random comment from someone no-doubt following a google link to jokerbone that relied on some mod_rewrite trick which I no longer use sums up Hacking-is-Cool very nicely…

i wanna A program to hack i wanna to be A famous Spy in the world

Note: I traced the commenters IP to somewhere in South America back when that was posted, content is more important here than poor grammar.

Sometimes, I really hate people.

(Me in New Orleans last year)

At work, we moved to a new office at the beginning of the month. I got upgraded from cube-vill to a center-office with windows, and a door.

A few days ago we got whiteboards.

The other team leader started using his for serious stuff - tracking projects, tech goals and deadlines, that sort of thing. I thought: Well, I don’t want to track anything like that on a whiteboard, it’s for brainstorming temporary stuff, I’ll just put a funny picture on it.

I picked . It’s a guy pointing to graphs on a whiteboard (or posterboard but bear with me).

The admin staff got a huge kick out of, I didn’t know why.

Today I found out that they thought I was teasing the other team leader for his whiteboard contents. His text columns were the same colors as the bars on !

I erased my board (after documenting it) as soon as I found out.

What does the following emoticon mean to you?

Comment before reading the replies of others!

:monocle: