Month: November 2006

Wood floors

The wife and I have decided that the new home we’re planning to buy is going to have to have wood floors somewhere.  If you’ve never chased a cat across a wood floor, watching her try to get traction on the slick surface, you really haven’t lived.

_No cats were harmed while getting inspiration for this post. _

A great tradition

I went to a funeral this morning. My cousin Jonathan (The oldest son of my grandmother’s sister, I can never remember what that’s called, but I’ve always thought of his as just plain cousin, not ‘removed’ or ‘second’ or whatever the proper term is) died on Tuesday. It was a nice funeral, and I got to see some family I don’t see very often. While it would be nice to see them more on happier occasions, it’s still nice to see them.

Jonathan was from the Jewish half of my family, and there’s a great tradition at Jewish funerals. The service beforehand is not terribly different from Christian services that I’ve been to, and that most of you are likely to be familiar with. But those who haven’t been to a Jewish internment are missing out on a great tradition. They have a little shovel and a little pile of dirt by the grave, and family and friends line up and each toss a little dirt on the coffin. It’s one last little good deed you can do for the person you cared about, and I think it’s a great way to give the mourners a sense of closure, that they’ve helped put the person to rest.

One of Jonathan’s best qualities was that he always remembered to ask about the people who weren’t there. And more than just ask, he honestly cared how they were doing. If I saw him, and my siblings weren’t there, he’d want to know how they were doing. It’s one of those things that seemed small when he was alive, but now I realize how much I appreciated it.

I’m glad I went to the service, and got to do one last good deed for him. He will certainly be missed.

Nano – 40,000 words

I passed the 40,000 word mark earlier this evening.  I’m currently at 41,047.  For a little while the story was kind of sucking, but maybe I’ve saved it.  Maybe not.  It’s not as good as my 2003 novel.  And it’s not exactly what I had planned.  But it’s not totally without positives.

I’m ready to be done, though.  There’s a lot of stuff I’ve been kind of putting off that I’d like to stop putting off.  I read a short story by Charles Stross recently (I’ve read a few of his novels already), and it has me wanting to write science fiction.  The problem is that I don’t know enough of the science to make the fiction work.  I don’t want to make up stuff (Like I’m doing with this Nano novel).  I want far-future-but-realistic, if that makes any sense.  So I think I need to do some reading of some real science, and then I can take a shot at science fiction.

It would also be nice to be done because I think my wife has been a little neglected.  She’s a good sport about it, but that doesn’t mean I should push my luck.

Michael Chertoff doesnt understand what better off means

Homeland Security to require passports for U.S. entry – CNN.com

“Each of these steps raises the bar to an attack. None of this is perfect. None of them is foolproof. But we’re always better off when we build higher levels of security,” [Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff] said.

It becomes increasingly clear that Chertoff seeks to lull the entire nation into a false sense of security.  Requiring everyone entering the country to show a single document so that security officers only have to worry about recognizing that one document does not make us safer.  In fact, it makes us less safe.  It’s like taking all the passwords you have for your bank, your credit card, your email, your whatever, and making them one long, random string of characters.  It’s really hard to break that string.  But if someone breaks it, or steals it, they know everything about you.

It doesn’t matter how hard it is to forge a passport.  It’s not necessary to forge one.  Just steal one.  All terrorists are Arab guys with beards and turbans, right?  And don’t they all look the same?  How do you know that the guy coming through your security checkpoint, most of his face concealed by a beard, is actually the guy pictured on the passport he hands you?  And do we honestly think that no one is capable of recruiting someone with a clean passport to blow up a plane or something?  We can’t possibly believe that we have a list of everyone who might ever wish to do the United States harm.

Someday, I hope people look back on this time in our history and realize how stupid we’re being.  And I hope it happens before we’ve done irreparable harm to the country.

OMG PHISHING!

This is the most ridiculous overreaction to hacking and phishing attempts I’ve ever seen.  I just had to read a 30 page PowerPoint highlighting the dangers of PHISHING, and, even more dangerous, SPEAR PHISHING.  Did they make that up?  That’s what they’re calling the more specifically targeted phishing attempts.

Anyway, they’ve disabled ALL webmail.  Which means there are now two computers in my entire office where I can check my email.  My WORK email.  All because some DoD employees can’t be bothered to learn basic web security, they’re going to, once again, make it harder for me to do my job.

Cool DIY site

instructables : Conjoined Twin Mice

Warning: dead mice in decorative form. If you disapprove of this concept on principle, please peruse some of the other new Instructables instead.

Instructables is a collection of HowTo guides from people on all sorts of things.  I found it through Lifehacker, telling you how to make a solar powered light in a jar, but this dead mouse art is obviously the pinnacle of the site.  Some of the stuff here just sucks, but some of it is pretty cool.

Its not even Thanksgiving

I say this every year, but I didn’t think I could, in good conscience, let this complaint go by.  There is Christmas stuff everywhere.  I see Christmas commercials on TV.  My beloved Caribou Coffee has their employees decked out in red, and they have their yuletide napkins out.

It’s bad enough that the day after Thanksgiving is the official start of the holiday shopping season.  But by the time December 25th rolls around, I want to shoot anyone who mentions the word ‘Christmas’.

Do you think our new Senator, Jim Webb, would care?  As I promised, I’m going to write to him as soon as Nano is over.  He’s an old school Navy guy.  He probably is opposed to the excessive commercialization of Christmas, right?

Google is changing the world

Today at work, and I don’t even remember how it came up, we were talking about a movie that one of my coworkers saw.  It’s about some guys who use a time machine to go back and hunt dinosaurs.  One of them accidentally kills a butterfly, and this has profound effects on the time in the future that they then return to.  He couldn’t remember the name of the movie.

So I type “dinosaur butterfly movie” into my handy little Firefox Google search bar.  The second hit takes me to a page that currently isn’t coming up (Although Google has a cache) that gives the plot of the movie, “A Sound of Thunder”, based on a Ray Bradbury story.  The page came up this afternoon when I first looked for it, though. What did we do before Google?  I don’t even know.  But I’ve gotten used to this instant location of whatever I need using only a vague idea of what it is to find it.

For reference, the first Yahoo result that refers to the movie is the fourth, and it’s for a Boston Globe review trashing the movie.  MSN returns as the first hit the Wikipedia page for the Bradbury story, which references the movie.  But I don’t use their searches, because they suck.  Although Yahoo hasn’t killed Flickr yet.  I do give them credit for that.