Year: 2007

I wonder sometimes just how far the feeling of entitlement will go in our misguided society. It seems these days that everyone thinks they’re entitled to something. Today I read a news blurb about a high school senior whose mother, Lydia Pratt, is up in arms because her daughter isn’t going to be allowed to join the graduation ceremony. Never mind the fact that this girl can’t pass the Georgia High School Graduation Test which is– not surprisingly– a requirement in order to actually graduate.

It would be interesting, I’m sure, to hear that argument. What precisely is the problem here? How is this unfair?

Luckily sanity prevailed:

The worst part of this whole thing is that by behaving in this crybaby way, Lydia is teaching her daughter that failure is okay because you can always whine about it and hope someone has pity. Thankfully in this case the school board did not.

I have no idea what this is all about.

Zack, like all kids his age, has a recurring problem obeying us when we ask him to do something. Tired of having to tell him over and over, Laralee came up with a novel solution: if she asks once and Zack doesn’t jump to it, he gets to do a chore.

In particular, he gets to scrub baseboards around the house.

It sure isn’t a fun job cleaning things with a toothbrush. After a few weeks of this, he’s much better about listening to us. And our baseboards are all nice and clean.

A couple of weeks ago, as a joke, I suggested to a bunch of friends that we get together and play dodgeball. I hadn’t played since college (junior year, as I recall) and thought it would be a hoot to get a group together and relive those glory days.

So we got about a dozen people, eight or so Nerf soccer balls, and played. It turned out to be a heck of a lot of fun– more than any of us expected, I think. I imagine everyone was like me: it would be a funny evening and we’d goof off for an hour. But in the end everyone was saying how much fun it had been, and when were we going to do it again, yada yada.

I organized a second game… then a third. More people were showing up, including wives and even a couple of the guys’ kids. It’s turning into quite the event. We’re playing again this week, and expect to have a few more new players.

The moral of the story, I guess, is that sometimes it’s just plain fun to relive your childhood.

An 18-year-old kid stole a big white SUV in Corpus Christi, Texas, and led police on a long chase. Apparently at times he was cruising above 80mph on the interstate, finally taking them into San Antonio. There, he met his fate.

Mwah ha HAAA! He hit the guardrail on an interstate on-ramp, apparently skidded along the top of it “skateboard-style”, and ended up crushed between the ramp and a neighboring interstate. (He’s the guy sitting pinned in the truck looking pretty unhappy while firefighters figure out how to get him out of there.)

Son, I think karma is speaking loud and clear.

So digital rights management, or DRM, has been getting a bad rap lately… mainly because it’s a terrible way to enforce copyright laws. But the chief technology officer over at HBO, Bob Zitter, has a fabulous idea that will surely conquer the fear and distrust that DRM has gained. He wants to rename DRM, and instead call it

(drumroll)

Digital Consumer Enablement

(moment of stunned silence)

I guess to him, “DRE” sounds better than “DRM” for some reason. Never mind that it’s exactly the same thing– it’s just supposed to sound friendlier to consumers.

Actually, is “enablement” even a word?

Things like this not only make me laugh, but only prove yet again that the industry and the technology firms it employs are unspeakably clueless.

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!