First Goatse

My inner adolescent laughed hysterically after I followed a link (with much trepidation, I must add) from Alison's miniblog [bluishorange.com] that was labeled first goatse [flickr.com]. I assure you that the link is SFW.

I probably shouldn't ruin it for you, but I'm going to anyway. The link is to a picture posted to Flickr of someone's reaction when they first learn what goatse is.

If you don't know what goatse is, you can check out the hilariously-thorough article on Wikipedia. But in short, goatse was a collosal internet in-joke. There was a website (originally located at goatse.cx) with a terrifying (NSFW) image, and people used to try to trick the naive into clicking on links that sent them there. And people very commonly had the reaction that is pictured in the above link to Flickr.

Wireless Bridges

I need some suggestions.

I'm still trying to get all of the computers situated in our new house. Downstairs is all good. Most of the machines are laptops which have wifi adapters already. Then there is the Tivo and the Mini-ITX [wikipedia.org] computer (media center box) on the entertainment center, which are right next to the router. So, as far as network connectivity, they can just be plugged right in.

Upstairs is a different story. I want to have at least two desktop machines up there, neither of which currently have wireless. And we might possibly have a third machine up there. Even if it is more expensive, I would like to connect those machines through a wireless bridge, instead of getting a wifi adapter for each of those computers. The idea is that I could use the built-in ethernet connections in those computers to interface with the wireless bridge. The wireless bridge would then transfer everything wirelessly to the wireless router, which in turn is connected to our cable modem. That way, I would only have to buy one device, instead of having to buy multiple wifi adapters. It would also provide the ability to have a Tivo-like device or console game system, which can't directly use wireless, upstairs. It would also simplify things for my Linux box (because of the notoriously poor wireless support in Linux). I know that I'll take a hit on transfer rates having three (or more) devices sharing one wireless connection, but those will all be computers that won't be tranferring a lot of data.

A year ago, a friend was looking for a wireless bridge, and I found one for him. Now, I want one, and I can't see to find a multi-port wireless bridge anywhere. All I can find are these one-port wireless bridges (like the Linksys WET54G [newegg.com]). If I buy one of those, I will have to put a router or switch in front of it, which will make any network latency even worse. And it's just annoying to have to buy two devices when I know that the right one could do the job. If anyone has any recommendations for me, please let me know.

I did find this Buffalo AirStation WLI-TX4-G54HP 4-port Wireless Bridge [amazon.com], but I've never heard of that company before, and don't know anyone who has personally used their equipment before. The few reviews I can find are good, so I'll probably buy that one if no one else gives me any suggestions.

House Projects

I officially feel like a homeowner now. It wasn't after signing over the down payment, and it wasn't after receiving the keys (although those really did feel like milestones). No, it was after spending this entire past weekend working on projects around our new house, and still not even really feeling like I had made a dent in the list.

I fixed doors, did some woodwork to replace a drawer front that got broken during the move, mounted shelves, removed some old rusty cabinets that were installed in the garage by the previous owner, etc. And that was on top of all of the other normal things I had to do this weekend (laundry, lawn mowing).

Being insanely busy isn't all bad, though. I haven't been able to watch any TV since moving into our new house. And my stereo receiver never got hooked up. At this point, I don't know if it ever will, because I see no signs of using either it or the TV in the near future. As a result, I might be dropping all of those horrible shows that I have been watching in recent years.

Believe me, I feel like a homeowner now. Or rather, I feel like I'm being owned (or should that be 0wn3d?) by a home now.

Fictional Expletives

The other day, Powazek linked to a Wikipedia article that listed fictional expletives [wikipedia].

Ok, my first thought was, "What is a fictional expletive?" It turns out that they are referring to the substitutes for expletives that characters in movies or tv-shows use. For instance:

• ass-clown From Office Space [imdb.com].


• bitca - from Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series [imdb.com], curse word for a malevolent entity (coined by Xander Harris, by misunderstanding when Willow Rosenberg delicately spelled out "b-i-t-c-h")


• cockbite - from online serial Red vs. Blue [roosterteech.com], as in "you cockbite!"


• frak - new spelling for "frack" used in the new Battlestar Galactica [imdb.com]. ...it also seems to carry the same "social weight" as fuck, as characters sometimes apologise for their language after using it.


• freebirth - from Battletech, used by genetically engineered Clan warriors to insult natural-born ones.


• fucktard - from B3ta; contraction of "fucking" and "retard"; meaning a fucking retard.


• ficky-fick - from Joseph Heller's Catch-22 [amazon.com]. A substitute for "fuck".


• melon farmer(s) - Director Alex Cox used this to provide a TV-friendly alternative to motherfucker(s) when asked to provide an alternative dub for mainstream broadcasting. The term has been adopted by a British censorship-watch website

I found the list to be surprisingly fascinating.

The Kite Runner

I had previously mentioned [fluggart.com] that I was reading Colin Powell's autobiography [amazon.com]. Well, I finished it recently (and thoroughly enjoyed the entire book), and started reading The Kite Runner [amazon.com].



It's been so riveting that I haven't been able to put it down. And so, after two days, I'm almost finished. It is a gut-wrenching story about a boy who grows up in Afghanistan before/during the Soviet invasion. And it explains a lot about their culture and how different their way of thinking is. And how things have changed with each subsequent invasion.

The story has been so interesting and plausible (and well thought-out), that I have forgotten at times that it is a novel. Normally, whenever I read something that has a hint of a redemption story, it seems really contrived. But the plot in this one seems very natural.

No Exit Numbers in Google Maps

I love Google Maps [google.com], and use it all of the time. It loads quicker, and is a lot easier to use than their competitors'. I find it much easier to find directions using Google Maps because of their color scheme, too. Blah, blah... yeah, I know I'm a Google fanboy.



The one thing that really annoys me about the service is that there are no exit numbers. I find that having exit numbers makes it a lot easier to figure out if you have already passed your exit or not, etc. Also, when I give people directions to my house, I like to give them exit numbers. And, shockingly, I don't have all the exit numbers memorized for all of the highways around here.

So, I end up figuring out which route I am going to take using Google Maps, and then going to their competitors to look up all of the exit numbers. It's quicker than trying to convince Google Maps to plot a route along the one I want to take.

Old Computer Games

I haven't had much time in the past few years to play computer games. But I used to play all of the time. It started when I was little and I used to play games like Lode Runner, Oregon Trail, and Maniac Mansion on an Apple ][e.

When I finally got a 486, I obsessively played games like Doom, Dune2 and Mechwarrior II. In later years, I played a ton of Descent, Age of Empires and Test Drive 5.

I loved those games so much, I still keep an old computer around so that I can play them (since a ton of those games won't run on a modern computer). A lot of those old games (especially the ones that ran in DOS) required you to have a soundcard (for instance) that they specifically supported. And, of course, because the soundcards in computers nowadays were invented a decade or more after the games were written, there is no way they are supported.

Recently, someone told me about DOSBox [sourceforge.net] and Scummvm [scummvm.org], which are emulators that allow you to play older games on a computer from this era. They create an environment that emulates the typical hardware that existed back then, so you don't have to make sure you have an ISA Soundblaster 16, along with a computer that still has ISA slots.

Reinstallation of Windows, the Easy Way

I currently have a Sony laptop. One of the things that annoyed me about it is that the recovery CDs force the system partition to use the NTFS file system. I wanted it to be a FAT partition, but every time I used the recovery CDs, they would reformat the partition. It was pretty annoying.

So, I decided to take the fresh installation of Windows, copy all of the data off of the partition, reformat it as FAT, and then copy all of the data back. I was hoping that would result in a fresh installation of Windows, on a partition with the file system of my choice.

Can you believe that it worked?

That gave me an idea. Every time I reinstalled Windows onto any of my computers, I would burn a copy of the files on that partition to a DVD. That way, if I ever needed to reinstall in the future, I could just copy the files from the DVD back onto the partition. It works really well, and it makes reinstallation really, really fast. My Windows partition got totally hosed on Friday, and I was able to perform a complete reinstall in about an hour (including the applications).

Copying files from a DVD to the hard drive is way faster than doing an installation from a Windows XP install disk. And it's definitely faster than using manufacturer's system restore CDs and then spending an hour uninstalling all of the crappy software that comes with it. Plus, you can change all of your preferences, and then burn a copy of the partition, so that you won't have to remember all of the preferences that you usually change around on your computer.

I, of course, use Linux to copy the files to and from the Windows partition. It's fast and cheap. Years ago, I used to use products like Norton Ghost, but recent versions of Ghost and other similar programs don't work as well as their older counterparts. I like the idea that I am using a backup solution that isn't dependent upon a software vendor that doesn't have my interests in mind.

More Archeology

A few weeks ago, I talked about some items we found in the house we bought that were left by the previous owner. Amazingly, we're still finding stuff.

A few of our friends came over this weekend to hang out and see the new house. When they saw the attic, they spotted some boxes in a crawlspace that I hadn't gotten around to fishing out yet. At that point, curiosity apparently took over, and they dove in and retrieved the boxes. I should add at this point that I wasn't there when this was taking place.

They were apparently surprised at what they found, and reported to me that I should check it out. And they hinted that the reason they wanted me to check it out is because they wanted to see my reaction... because it was related to one of my worst fears.

With much trepidation, I went up to the attic to look at what they had found. And when I opened the box, I found... a bassinet from the 1950s, along with some maternity clothes from the same era. Below is a picture of me right after figuring out what was in the box.



Apparently, my friends are under the impression that my top fears include babies (?). I assure you, dear reader, that they do not. And it certainly isn't an irrational fear or anything like that. I don't have nightmares about babies "getting" me. I do, however, have nightmares about buying a house that is really creepy...

Colin Powell

As I mentioned before, I picked up a copy of Colin Powell's autobiography [amazon.com]. Out of all of the books that I picked up at the booksale, that was the book I decided to read first.

I have to say that I am enjoying it immensely. He has an unexpectedly good sense of humor that makes the book fun to read. He also has a lot of very interesting insights into a lot of different topics, having been an African-American during the civil rights movement, having served in the military during the Vietnam War, and having served as a Washington insider during many events including the Iran-Contra affair [wikipedia.org] and Operation Desert One [wikipedia.org].

The parts that I most enjoyed were the unique experiences that he has had. For instance, as a boy, he worked at a furniture store where the owner and a lot of the customers spoke Yiddish. And he began to pick it up. So, the owner would have Powell show customers to the second floor to look at furniture. The customers would not expect him to speak Yiddish, so they spoke it openly in front of him (like how much they were really prepared to offer), and he would report back with his intelligence to the owner.

Cox Cable

Up until last year, I hadn't had a landline in at least 5 years. It's actually probably been longer, but I don't remember. And in that time, I had managed to forget exactly why I hated SBC and having a landline so much. It's partly because the intentionally make their bills difficult to understand (why aren't the charges the same amount every month?), and partly because of the ludicrous number of junk phone calls you receive (even being on the do-not-call registry [donotcall.gov]).

When we moved into our condo last year, I ordered Yahoo/SBC DSL because it was cheaper than the alternatives. We had to have a landline, because the building intercom system only works through the phone. So, if we didn't have a landline, we wouldn't be able to buzz guests into the building. Anyway, I ordered a landline though them, taking a deal they had on a bundle with DSL.

Anyway, all of the memories of why I hated SBC and landline so much came screaming back. First of all, their customer service was horrible. They got our bill wrong 6 months in a row. So, every month, we had to wait on hold for an hour to talk to someone, who we would eventually find out was changing our account around into a different wrong configuration.

It also took them forever (~3 weeks) for us to receive our DSL modem. And when it arrived, I found that I had to install some crappy software to register its MAC address [wikipedia.org].

I was very pissed off, and will now do everything possible to avoid doing business with them in the future. Compare that to my experience with Cox Cable, who activated our cable service the same day I ordered it, and always billed us correctly. Plus, the odd times I have had to call their customer service, I haven't had to wait on hold for an hour.

So, at our new place, I ordered Cox Cable again and a cable modem from them. It is more expensive, but I'm willing to pay more to get good customer service. Once again, it was activated very quickly. And when I picked up the cable modem, I found that its MAC address had already been registered, so all I had to do was plug it in.

I find it disappointing that I'm so surprised when services work they way they should. And we already got our first bill, and it was charged correctly. My only complaint so far is that they refused to unblock port 25 [wikipedia.org] on my account.

The Funny Thing About Weblogs...

Last week, Alison commented that "one of the things that makes me happiest about having chronicled my life here for the last six years is that i don't remember this incident at all, but my weblog does."

That is so funny, because it is so true. Although I have just started this weblog a few months ago, I weblogged elsewhere for years before. And I noticed that sometimes I would include a throw-away comment in one of my posts about something that just happened to me, and even though I may have long forgotten it, my weblog remembers. Actually, the more frightening thing probably is that my friends remember.

I see negative articles about the consequences of weblogging all of the time. But I think that one of the biggest positives for me is the ability to go back through and read about things I was doing a few years ago -- things I would have long forgotten about had I not written about them.

See, I'm Smart. It's Not Like Everybody Says...

Uh, yeah... no post yesterday. I hadn't hooked up the computers yet.

We finished moving into our new house on Sunday, and we're now in the never-ending unpacking stage. So, it's not that we don't have internet at the new place yet. The problem is that there was no available table space to put the computers.

But it's going alright. I've already managed to fix an electrical problem in our new house without electrocuting myself, much to the surprise of Heimlich. I keep trying to convince her that I deal with those electron-things all of the time, and almost, kind of, know what I'm doing. Or something.

And we managed to have a number of other surprises during the move. Like, for instance, finding out that it is not possible to get our bed's boxspring up the stairs to the bedroom. That was a fun realization, let me tell you...

We have now moved from a small condo to a house that is literally twice the size. And we're trying to figure out how it is possible that we have too much stuff for it all to fit.

Gun Trucks in Iraq

On BoingBoing earlier this week [boingboing.net], I saw a link to a pretty amazing Flickr photostream [flickr.com].



The photostream included pictures of vehicles that have been modified into gun trucks by private security firms in Iraq. On BoingBoing, the accompanying post says that it reminded them of MadMax -- an opinion that I have to agree with. Those pictures are amazing.

Those pictures really remind me of the technicals that the warlords use in Somalia. Technicals are essentially any vehicles that belt-fed machine guns are bolted onto.

Lakewood Streets

As we continue to move into our new house, we are learning more about our new neighborhood and the names of the streets, as well as the fastest routes to take.

And as we learn all of those things, we are also learning about all of the oddities of the neighborhood. For instance, look at the below map:



That is a closeup of the northwest corner of the city of Lakewood, OH. I would like to know exactly how it came to be that there are essentially three streets that almost all intersect, which are all named Clifton. Can you imagine trying to give directions to your house through there?

And unfortunately, this is not the only example...

Pub Crawl Flashback

Story Background: I used to be the organizer of a pub crawl group. I would contact a number of bars in the same area of town, arrange for the group to get discounts, and then get about 100 people to come out on one Saturday evening and have a great time hitting bars together. I organized them for a couple of years, until I realized that I had to focus on my dissertation or I would never finish.



Now that I've gotten that out of the way... This past weekend, I went to a party being thrown by one of the numerous friends who I met through the pub crawls I organized. And I was actually surprised to see a lot of former pub crawlers there too.

One woman completely surprised me by introducing herself, and then explaining that she met her husband at a pub crawl. They got married a little while ago, and are now expecting their first child!

So, that's actually the second time I have heard from people who are now married, who met at a pub crawl. I just looked through a bunch of pictures from those pub crawls (the above one is from one in Lakewood in 2002), because that story really made me nostalgic. It almost makes me want to start organizing them again.

CWRU Booksale

Today is the last day for the annual booksale at Case Western Reserve University [cleveland.com].

The booksale is great, because you can pick up tons of books ridiculously cheap. So, I go every year. And I have previously talked about how the local libraries in my city aren't that great [fluggart.com], so picking up books at the booksale is a higher priority these days.

I think that I picked up a bunch of paperbacks for like $0.50 each, and Heimlich picked up an entire box of flute music for $0.10 per piece. We spent about $20, and that was about all I could carry on one trip. Among the titles I picked up were:

• My American Journey, by Colin Powell


• Spy Catcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer, by Peter Wright


• Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle


• Hammerheads, by Dale Brown


• The Conspiracy Club, by Jonathan Kellerman


• Private Parts, by Howard Stern

I picked up those, and probably about 8-10 others (although they are packed up for our move, and I can't remember what they are). I figured it was a nice variety that would keep me occupied for a few months.

Lake Peigneur

Last week, there was a Slashdot thread about Engineering Mistakes [slashdot.org]. And in the thread, there was a comment about Lake Peigneur [slashdot.org].

Having not heard of that incident before, I looked up the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org], which explains that it was a lake that ended up being drained into a salt mine, after a miscalculation by an oil drilling rig. Here's a quote from the article:

The lake then proceeded to drain into the hole, with the packed salt underneath absorbing water nearly as fast as it poured in, resulting in the draining of the lake into the salt mine. A resultant whirlpool sucked in the drilling platform, eleven barges, many trees and some of the surrounding terrain. The salt mine was so large and so able to absorb the water pouring into it that the water level dropped significantly, enough to reverse the flow of the Delcambre canal that leads to the Gulf of Mexico. This backflow created, for a few days, the largest waterfall ever in the state of Louisiana with 50–100 feet (15–30 m), as the lake refilled with salt water to replace the fresh water now in the salt mine.

Holy crap. Can you imagine being one of the people on the drilling rig and having to explain that one?

iPods

A few months back, Heimlich asked me whether an iPod would simplify things for her. She is always shuffling CDs at home and at work. I told her that it probably would, but she balked when she found out how much they cost (she's too practical to blow a bunch of money on a needless electronic gadgets).

So, I decided to surprise her with one. And of course, I couldn't just hand her an iPod. I had to rip some of her CDs first. Unfortunately, I wasn't slick enough, and she caught me ripping her CDs.

At first when she caught me, she thought that I had bought an iPod for myself, and I was just trying to hide that from her. That confused her, because I already have an MP3 player (albeit, not one as cool as an iPod). Then, when she realized that it was for her, she became very excited.



So excited, in fact, that she spent every waking moment of the next few days ripping the rest of her CDs (and any other CD that she could get her hands on). She actually ripped so many CDs that she ended up killing the CD drive in her laptop...

The TSA's Constitution-Free Zones

In last month's edition of Bruce Schneier's Crypto-gram [scheier.com], I saw a link to an article [arstechnica.com] about a guy who ended up on the TSA watch-list.

The guy got onto the watch-list in the first place for having an unspecified, inappropriate item in his carry-on luggage. To start, I would like to give the TSA credit for investigating someone who is actually suspicious. Whereas most of the time when you hear about the watch-list, it is because the system is so poorly designed (and in my opinion, bordering on criminal negligence), that infants suspected of being terrorists are prevented from flying [sfgate.com]. Where I fault the TSA is how they effectively suspend the constitutional rights of anyone they think is suspicious.

Here's a quote from the article:

"...the security checkpoint at an American airport is effectively a 'Constitution-free zone' (Bill's term), where you have no Miranda rights, no protection from any probable cause requirements for searches, and you're completely at the mercy of the individuals in the system. With respect to case law, this is also uncharted territory for the courts, and there are no binding precedents that cover these types of situations, because it's all simply too new to have been litigated enough."

In my opinion, this is horrifying, and is probably one of the few areas where I hope that there is tons of litigation, in order to get that entire system sorted out.