The Aerie
[waalcor1.jpg] "Oh mah lord in hayven, it's two entries in one week!
Lan sakes, tell the neighbors!"
Well, an exciting weekend.
First of all, it's the Week from Hell around our house. Three family
birthdays all in one week's time, so it turns into a zoo. On top of
that my wife is Block Club captain, and National Night Out occurs in
the same week. The result? Our schedule is:
Sunday, extended-family birthday party;
Monday, daughter's party and sleep-over;
Tuesday, National Night Out block club party;
Wednesday, Son's party and sleep-over;
Thursday: gaming with Prof. Barker.
So it's a busy week. Last night after the extended family party (and
all the attendant cleaning beforehand) I passed out on the couch like
I'd been felled with a brick to the head.
[t250.gif] On the other hand, I just got a lovely new treat for
myself. I suspect it will be my birthday present, although as yet I
have no idea how much it costs. It's the Mitsubishi T250 Wireless
Internet Phone. Yes, now I can get my e-mail, browse the web, and do
all sorts of other stuff from my cell phone.
People don't understand why this is so exciting for me, but that's
because they're not me. I grew up at exactly the right time for this
to be phenomenally cool. I was fifteen when I started using the
computer, but ever since then I've had a picture of this kind of thing
in my head. Actually I wanted something more like the [1]Nokia 9110i,
but of course that's a GSM phone and we don't have GSM in America
because, why, we're Americans and we have our own protocols, damnit.
We don't need no furrin prot-ee-calls here.
But I've long had the dream of a little device in my pocket that would
let me know what my e-mail is, the status on all the servers I'm
managing, etc. While this isn't ideal it will do for now. I still
have to set up interfaces to the phone, but at least I can start with
something.
The hilarious thing is, of course, that when you boil web services
down small enough to transmit to a cell phone, you end up back with
[2]Gopher. Gopher was written for situations where the final
transmission hop is the bottleneck. But with all these so-called
'experts' running willy-nilly over the web, and companies making
millions on cell-phone technology, they're all out reinventing the
wheel rather than using something established. Oh well! No skin off
my nose!
So I've got my web toy, but I still don't have the time to do anything
with it! C'est la vie!
[3]Last
So I mentioned in my [1]last note how I was planning on applying to
the [2]Survivor show. I should have known it was a mistake.
I'm convinced at some point somebody hit me with the Confucious Curse:
"May you live in interesting times." Certainly, there's got to be
something about this, because I weird stuff keeps happening to me even
when I don't try. Actually, things usually happen when I don't try.
Could this be any exception?
So after work on Tuesday I drive over to Roseville and take a number
for the three-minute tryouts. Unlike the others, I decide that
there's no point in standing in line for an hour and a half when I
have a number, so I go and sit down at Caribou Coffee and work on my
computer.
One of the questions I was wondering about was callbacks: the second
round of Minneapolis interviews is scheduled for when I'm going to be
out of town. As I was thinking about this, I hear a woman behind me
say "I've got a couple of good prospects." I look over my shoulder.
She's talking on a cell phone, and she's wearing the same kind of
outfit as the Survivor staffers: khaki shorts and a T-shirt.
Figuring her for a senior staffer (imagining that her call was back to
New York) I asked what happens if someone were out of town for the
callback...
Well, maybe I'll [3]let her tell it...(if that's expired, try [4]here)
Yes, that's right, she was a journalist for the Pioneer Press... the
'bystander' that she mentions in her own story. And then the story
got picked up on the AP wire, and I end up on [5]Yahoo!
Of course, one of my coworkers has to be a Survivor fanatic, so what
does he do but spot my name first thing the next morning, and by lunch
it's all over the company.
So that's bad enough and I suffer the embarassment and humiliation,
and I get to my Thursday Night Game and my friend Keith starts
laughing at me about Survivor. "You saw it in the paper?" I ask
morosely. "I saw the back of your head on WCCO TV."
Great. I'd seen the TV cameraman, I'd deliberately kept my back to
him, and Keith had recognized the back of my head. Lovely.
I'm so thrilled to be living under a Confucian Curse in the
Information Age.
[6]Last
All in all, a fun vacation.
The company I work for provides these cabins "up north" where the
employees can stay for vacations. Well, you can call them "cabins,"
but the smallest of them have more amenities than my own home. As
long as you don't mind birch-bark kitsch and incessant golf and
fishing knicknacks, what's not to love about a hot tub, a heated
swimming pool, pontoons, bonfires, cable TV, and stereo... all for
free, for a whole week? It's like winning a trip on a game-show every
year!
[marching.gif] Speaking of game-shows, I have just learned (due to
staying up way too late) that Survivor is having local tryouts on July
24th. Yes, it's my ego run amok, I know, but I can't resist it. I
didn't apply last time because the formal local tryouts were scheduled
for when I was going to be out of town. Now, however, I can attempt
to hit this event and get my name in the queue. Yes, my chances of
being chosen are zero, but what the hell. My chances of being chosen
are even lower than zero if I don't try it, and unlike a lottery, I
can hardly expect to find the winning ticket on the floor.
Anyway, the vacation was great, even if it did feature rain and
record-cold temperatures on Tuesday. We made the best of it, taking
the family to see Chicken Run (two thumbs up), and over to a Burger
King indoor playground. Like a brush with death, Tuesday's inclement
weather made us appreciate Wednesday and Thursday even more. We
looked up at blue sunny skies and puffy white clouds and realized,
"Hey, it could have been gray and rainy, like Tuesday, every day this
week."
By pure coincidence, both my supervisor (who wasn't even my supervisor
yet when I made the reservation last year) and the company president
were on vacation at the same place, at the same time. So on Thursday
I screwed up all my reserves of chutzpah and inveigled myself into
their golf game. I'd played golf exactly one time before, so this was
pretty nervy on my part. But, like applying for Survivor, it's in
keeping with my philosophy of not experiencing fear... although at
$100 for the course fee, I'm finding myself experiencing poverty!
The game was, well, as far as I can tell, fine. Sure, I sucked wind
from a big paper bag. Sure, I rocketed most of my shots out into the
brush. Sure I lost 16 balls in 18 holes. And once I nearly beaned
the president (I did not know that a golfball could corkscrew 60
degrees off the line struck -- honestly!) But even if the company
president now thinks I'm a complete doofus, he at least knows I
exist. Why this is worth $100 bucks, I can't say, except there seems
no point at all to being nobody to the top people at my company.
Thursday night I tried to use the big telescope that Santa brought for
the kids. No luck. It is going to take a lot more practice -- or
expensive automation -- before I can hold an image in place using that
thing. All this science-fiction stuff about shooting lasers at ships
in outer space? Pure bologna! All I was trying to do was fix a star
into a cone several thousand AU across, and I couldn't hold the image
in place long enough to even focus it. Not that the rapacious
attentions of the mosquitoes were helping any...
One small coup was calling an auto salvage place up north, rather than
in the cities. We were able to stop by and pick up, for a song, a
part that cost $100 in town. Along the way, we got to experience a
new route home, which was lovely, quiet, and fun to drive -- much
better than the freeway.
I didn't get as much writing done as I wanted, but on the other hand,
we did everything rig [sunsetsoar2.jpg] ht this trip: we cleaned
before we left, and we did our laundry there and brought it home. The
result? No chores this weekend! None! I can do just about anything
I want -- I just have to go to two family functions (sigh), but what
the hell. I even got all my computer hacking out of the way tonight
so I hopefully won't have to hook up tomorrow. I also had fun when we
got home by calling in to James [1]Lileks' radio show this evening,
using my Albatross moniker. Had a silly chat about True Grit, Patton,
and Amerigo Vespucci. Lots of fun...
So it was a grand week out, and I'm sorry it's over. Looking forward
to the August trip, that's for sure! Two weeks of driving in a
minivan, woo hoo! Walley World, here we come!
[2]Last
The vacation is well underway and things are starting to look a little desperate. We're all wearing our brave smiles, but inside we're like little kids looking at a bare tree at Christmas: is this what we get?
There's nothing about a July poolside vacation that recommends itself to the phrase "record low temperatures." Last night it was colder up here in Brainerd than at any time since I was born. Today I figured out how to light the furnace. "You can still have a good time," my wife says gamely, "it's just a different kind of vacation." Yes, indeed -- a vacation spent entertaining the kids, like every other week of summer break, rather than a vacation where the kids entertain themselves endlessly in the pool. Like we had at this time last year.
So we headed over to see Chicken Run but it turns out every tourist in the area had the same notion: the 3:15 was sold out. We bought tickets for the 5:15, and now we're sitting here at Burger King, letting the kids enjoy the PlayLand. I suppose I shouldn't complain: it won't be too many years before the twins are too old for such childish indulgences. Instead they'll sit moodily and stare at the PlayLand, wondering how many points off their personal cool-tally would be subtracted if they ventured inside. But for now they're happy to be here, and I suppose that's a blessing.
The perpetual overcast diffuses the sun into a blue-white glare that roars in the giant windows and makes it nearly impossible to see the screen. This is what I consider "headache weather:" the dimness of the sunlight dilates my eyes open, and then the ultraviolet roars unhindered through the cloud deck and gives me a migraine. And despite the fact that this is supposed to be a modern new computer, its screen is the dimmest of all laptops I've ever owned.
The forecast for tomorrow is a 40% chance of thunderstorms, high of seventy. I'd despair, but the forecast for our sunny day in June was a 40% chance of thunderstorms, too, so I'll just wait and see what happens. That's all I can do anyway.
Sunday we'd had another one of my wife's "family days." We went to Lakeview Cemetary to see the graves of two characters from her favorite book series. My wife is an unreconstructed romantic, and adores the "Betsy, Tacy and Tib" series of children's books. Set in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Mankato, Betsy, Tacy and Tib are fictionalized versions of the author and her childhood friends, whose adventures are followed until they all get married (when, presumably, their lives are over, subsumed into their husbands' ambitions). Two of the characters are the author's parents, portrayed as paragons of virtue and progressive thinking (Betsy's father encourages her to take a year off of college and travel to Europe -- in the days before the Great War).
So Sunday found Sapphire gathered around an anonymous pair of gravestones with a bunch of equally-romantic women, discussing the merits and natures of the characters based on the deceased persons underfoot. For well over an hour.
There's only so much entertaining that can be done with three little kids in a cemetery. They climbed on gravestones, trees and boulders, but eventually the amusement wore thin. Along the way I found an interesting plaque Coleen C Wylie Hauck, 1928-1996, whose tombstone read "To the end of infinity." Surrounded by pious platitudes beseeching God's mercy, this was a confident, headstrong declaration. Does it make any sense? No. But it takes a certain chutzpah to set sail for the great hereafter without even checking your grammar.
Then the group moved on to the gravestone of the stillborn-child of the author. We waited in the car, and they still took half an hour to fail to find with certainty the gravestone.
Wow, a whole week this time. I don't have any good excuses, except
maybe summer!
Toasty this week. Toasty for Minnesota, that is, which means mid-90's
and humid. Bleah. Walking outdoors is like wading through a stick of
butter.
The hackers have been getting bored. I think I've gone a couple of
days now without anyone trying to hack in from anyplace. Something
about trying to telnet in and having absolutely nothing happen must
get a little old after a while.
This last week has been pretty busy. Trying to build a security
practice at work, while also billing at a client site, while also
writing two books and starting a small business: well, okay, that's
overstating the case a little, but it could get to that point if I'm
not careful.
Took Leo to aikido on Thursday and WOW was THAT hot! Nothing like
dressing in a quilted jacket on a hot, humid day and then exercising
vigorously. Leo got sick and headachey and we went home halfway
through, and I can't say I was far behind him.
I've been considering getting a digital camera, even though I've
already got a scanner. What I ought to do, reallly, is get a Polaroid
camera and just scan in the shots. But I suspect what I'll do is be
wildly fiscally irresponsible and buy a digital camera. Of course
like most Americans, I Want It Now. And no screwing around: I want a
3-Megapixel digital camera with 6x optical zoom and a USB connector.
Or something. But I don't have about $800 to throw at it.
I realize this is rambling, but I'm determined to post something
tonight. I've got the TV off (damn the monocular beast!) and I'm just
stream-of-consciousnessing right through the keyboard. It's hot,
humid, and I worked 11 hours today -- 7 to 6. Poor pitiful me. And
I'm slumped back in my free $100 chair with my eyes closed, curious to
see how many typos I generate when I'm typing.
When I had high school typing I remember that we were never supposed
to look at the page, always at the manuscript from whence we were
typing. What nonsense. And how archaic in this day of spell-checkers
and grammar checkers. But back then there were no computers (quite
yet -- I was using X,Typeset in 1977 on a mainframe to place my
juvenile screeds about Why Trading Passwords was Okay into a more
respectable format. (Hm, whole paragraph and all I did was put three
o's in school.(Ack! Nested Parentheses! I'm speaking with a LISP!
(Programmer joke)))). When you typed, it went on the page, and if you
wanted to correct a mistake, you took out a bottle of white-out and
painted it on the paper.
Nowadays I buy novels from respectable publishers with no typos, but
with the wrong real word inserted in a sentence because while it
spell-checks and grammar-checks correctly, it makes no sense. We're
in that technological gray area between grammar-checking and
meaning-checking, beyond which comes Goodthink checking. No pothole
tests the suspension of disbelief like suddenly noticing the text when
reading a novel.
Well, now I'm starting to sound like a curmudgeon, so I'm off.
Hopefully I'll post again in less than a full week! Not that any of
my three monthly readers actually care. (More poor pitiful me!)
[1]Last
Well, THIS has been an interesting week!
It started on Wednesday when I had insomnia. Couldn't sleep. So at
2:30 a.m. I wandered over to the console and started poking around at
my computer... and I saw this
Jul 5 18:32:22 albatross PAM_pwdb[23827]: password for (root/0) changed by ((n
ull)/0)
Jul 5 18:42:47 albatross useradd[23890]: new group: name=chatx, gid=507
Jul 5 18:42:47 albatross useradd[23890]: new user: name=chatx, uid=507, gid=50
7, home=/home/chatx, shell=/bin/bash
Jul 5 18:43:06 albatross PAM_pwdb[23891]: password for (chatx/507) changed by
((null)/0)
Well, given that it was 2:30 a.m. at the time, the hackers had had
plenty of time to screw around in the system. I found new
directories, downloaded software, etc.
Fortunately Linux, while it has many holes in its OS, has a fairly
healthy recovery mechanism, and every time the hackers screwed up a
connection it locked them out, and they had to get back in through
another computer. By the time they logged out after six hours, they'd
added several entries to the table of automatic exclusions.
Well, I spent a couple of busy days tightening up the system's
security and [1]notifying the authorities, who reacted with
astonishing speed and fortitude (i.e. I have yet to hear anything
back).
It was my own fault, really. A case of "the cobbler's children are
the last ones shod": here I am this big security wanker, and I let my
system sit unpatched for months.
Well, part of it was deliberate. The system is well-backed-up and
doesn't have anything proprietary on it -- no credit cards, no defense
department secrets, etc., -- and I was kind of using it as a "honey
pot," a lure to draw in hackers. Why? Well, I wanted to see just how
"real" the security threat is.
And it's quite real, as I learned! The system has only been up for
six weeks and it has already been hacked. And in this case, by a
bunch of guys from Kuwait!
At least, that's how it appears. Granted, they're probably guys from
Schenectady who simply hacked into a bunch of computers in Kuwait.
It's hard to tell based on their hours: they seem to keep Western
hours. But they're also persistent. How persistent? Well, I
battened down the hatches almost two days ago now, but...
Jul 7 20:47:09 albatross in.telnetd[5181]: refused connect from access2-16.kun
iv.edu.kw
Jul 7 20:47:31 albatross in.telnetd[5182]: refused connect from access2-16.kun
iv.edu.kw
Yep, that's about an hour ago. They keep at it. And I keep calling
them in. Using skills developed over years of turning in spammers, I
quickly report new connection attempts to the IT staff at the various
places they try to reach me from. Today they hacked through a
SOCKS-proxy at a Texas engineering firm -- that's shut down now. And
I've been having a great series of chats with peopel at UUNet,
University of Kuwait, Time Warner, and other locations.
But I'm learning, too. Having my clock synchronized is important -- I
found out I'm several minutes off, which makes it hard for them to
review their connection logs. Letting the folks on the other end know
what time zone I'm in is important.
So, that's why the latest long-gap in updates. Annoying, but it has
been a good spur to get me to do things that need doing, securing the
box and learning the ropes. And while CERT has be unresponsive, and
SANS is too busy throwing their latest shindig to answer their phones,
the folks at the regional institutions have been very responsive.
UUNet keeps telling me "they've dealt with the situation in accordance
with their AUP," which I assume means they closed some poor bastard's
account who didn't know who he was even hacked.
Anyway, if you're one of the guys trying to hack me, it's okay to stop
now.
[2]Last
I spend a lot of time, comparatively, that is compared to normal
people, arguing politics in on-line. Even when I attempt to escape
the usual nests of such villians, the Star Tribune On Line or Salon,
the discussions emerge in normally non-political places, such as the
web conference for my church.
I go to a liberal church: it's about as liberal as it can get and
still be a church, and not a naked forest dance. But while the church
and its philosophies are liberal, some of its members are not
politically liberal, and one of them has raised the debate of whether
one can be a political conservative in a religiously liberal church.
Liberal and conservative are too broadly applied, IMO. There are
different forms of conservatism: social conservative, political,
fiscal, moral, and religious. So is there only one way to be
conservative? No. I'm fiscally conservative, butut I'm socially
liberal.
I've really been contemplating my own thin-skin regarding social and
moral conservatism lately, and I don't have any good answers yet. I
think the thing which irritates me the most about chatting on line
with social and moral conservatives is that I honestly can't believe
they believe all the stuff they spout. I don't mean that in a snide
way, I mean that I am always wondering whether they are jerking my
chain or are actually sincere.
I mean, the same people who will decry government interference or
involvement in ANY private affair (a social conservative) seem also to
be the ones who refuse to acknowledge that homosexuality is a natural
condition of humankind (thus, moral conservative.) For a person who
is both social and moral conservative, it's not okay for the
government to inspect your workplace for safety violations, but it is
okay for the government to inspect your urine for private consumption
of drugs, or to prosecute you for private sexual activities between
consenting adults. They don't see or won't acknowledge the cognitive
dissonance between contradictory beliefs founded in their various
social and moral belief structures. Maybe they have a hierarchic
model, where moral beliefs overrule social beliefs?
So I see this cognitive dissonance coming from an individual and I
can't figure out what to say to them: either they don't acknowledge
it as cognitive dissonance (in which case all appeals to logic and
reason are likely to fail), or they're disingenuous, or they haven't
thought the topic through.
This problem is only exacerbated by the notion of a socially and
morally conservative religious liberal. How can this work? Do they
read our Principles as "I respect the sacred journey of every person
assuming they follow the Bible and not some uncivilized pagan
belief"? "I believe in the worth and dignity of every person except
that by 'person' I don't include bastards or homosexuals"?
I rely heavily upon logic and reason in discussion ideas with others.
I've been accused, by conservatives, of losing my temper because my
belief system is weak. I think they're close, but not quite on: I
think I feel threatened by illogical belief systems, because if I
can't trust logic and reason, then my belief system collapses. So
when I try to discuss ideas with conservatives, and I don't receive
clear statements or logical constructions in reply, the basis for my
own faith is called into question.
Finally, and this is also important, being a conservative is the
practice of saying "No." "No" to government spending, "no" to social
change, "no" to moral evolution (sometimes even "no" to evolution
itself). The process of being a liberal, however, is the "pro-"
position of debate; a lot more work. Liberals have to identify a
problem, develop a solution, and present it for public display.
Conservatives don't even need to wake up from a night's sleep. They
just launch their lazy "no"s out there, ignoring reasoned debate,
logical arguments, even impassioned appeals to justice, ethics and
compassion. All a curmudgeon need to do is type "no" and the liberal
is left facing the fight or flight decision, with neither being
satisfying.
And that's frustrating. Sure, it's GOOD that conservatives function
as brakes and governors upon every wacky idea that comes down the
pike. But it's also part of the reason why conservative initiatives
are almost an oxymoron. When social conservatives launch concepts,
such as Newt's famous "return to orphanages" idea, they fail much more
often, because conservatives aren't as practiced on promoting their
ideas as they are shooting down those of others.
So arguing with conservatives of any sort is like arguing with a brick
wall made of "no"s. And if you can't break through, it often makes
more sense to just go around.
[1]Last