Sometimes funny, sometimes thoughtful, always a good time
I just got a new 22″ widescreen LCD monitor, and I see that on the box there’s a nice big fat “Certified for Windows Vista” sticker.
What the heck is this? The monitor will work with Windows Vista? Do we have to certify every bloody piece of standard computer hardware? Should I look for a keyboard that’s certified before I make a major purchasing decision? Sheesh.
Of course I don’t use Vista, so now I’m left wondering if it’ll work with my Linux system… uh oh.
Holy cow, the spam is all but gone!
For years I’ve been dealing with e-mail spam. I’ve reconfigured my mail servers, installed software and filters, and come up with increasingly clever rulesets and parsing scripts to block the deluge. In general I’ve been pretty successful, but on an average day I probably receive well over a hundred legitimate e-mail messages, and since I do so much work and commerce online, my address is on untold numbers of spam lists, so if I didn’t do anything at all I suspect I’d have several thousand spam messages a day.
After several abortive attempts, I wrote a software program to perform something called “greylisting”, and tested it for a couple of days to make sure it works. (I did this because installing it on my mail server affects a couple hundred customers and several thousand e-mail accounts I’m running.) I finally took the plunge today and installed it, and I think I received a single spam message all day. Woo hoo!
Of course it’s Saturday, and e-mail traffic seems to be a bit lower on the weekend, but I’m hopeful that next week I’ll finally be able to hop online in the morning and not delete a hundred messages before work.
Sweeeeeet.
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0
That’s the now-famous number that can be used to break AACS encryption and decrypt HD-DVDs. The MPAA has been issuing DCMA threats to web sites publishing the number, and as of this week there’s a full-scale revolt across the internet as hundreds of thousands of people post the number on their sites.
Of course it’s ludicrous that the MPAA can claim any kind of ownership or restrictions on what is essentially a very large integer. But they’re doing their best, and looking like complete fools in the process.
As Cory Doctorow said:
The number is everywhere now, including t-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, and even song lyrics. Heck, it even seems to be appearing in fortune cookies!
“America believes in education: the average professor earns more money in a year than a professional athlete earns in a whole week.”
— Evan Esar
Sadly, after all these years our little Sony Cybershot digital camera has given up the ghost. I seems to work some of the time, but the photos end up looking a little strange:
Notice the little dots of light raining from the ceiling. Unless our house is haunted by mischievous little dots of light, it’s an artifact of the camera.
Sometimes we get really amazing noise:
I guess you can’t go on vacation and come back with a hundred shots like that, so it’s time to retire this little guy.
According to the latest Harris poll, George has fallen to a new low:
Excellent – 7%
Pretty Good – 22%
Only Fair – 23%
Poor – 48%
Only 29% of the people are in the positive camp; a whopping 71% are negative about his job performance.
The real question, in my mind, is who on earth is in that 7% group who think he’s doing an “excellent” job? Wow.
Irony is so funny.
The photo of the day, shot during Attorney General Gonzales’ testimony before a Senate committee.
Yesterday I got after Kyra because she was cracking her (hard-boiled) egg by throwing it at the ceiling in the kitchen. A couple of hits on the ceiling took care of it, and then she could peel the egg. When I told her not to do that, her response was, “But mom does it!”
To that, I replied that apparently I needed to talk to mom, and possibly ground her for her bad behavior.
“But you can’t ground a mom,” protested Kyra.
“Why not?”
“Because moms have rights!”
“Really? Do kids have rights?”
“Not really.”
Then Zack joined in with, “Dads can do anything they want.”
Apparently that’s the real rub. Kids think their parents can do “anything they want” while they, of course, are stuck with far-too-early bedtimes and not enough play time and too many chores and on and on. My argument that I work eight to ten hours a day fell on deaf ears. In their perception, I have total freedom and they can’t wait until they become a mom or dad because then they’ll be able to eat all the candy they want and watch whatever movie they want and so forth.
And not get grounded.