Misspent youth

I saw this recently here in Austin:

It reminded me of my misspent youth, when 2cents and I would hang out in the basement of Barstan's pub on Mill St. in Orono, Maine (right next to Pat's).  They'd get Irish music from Schooner Fare, and we'd do shots of Jameson's Irish Whiskey with a beer chaser.  After enough shots, we could sing this with them.  Or at least, it seemed that we could.



Good times, good times.  Except for the time that Bill fell face down on the table and we (meaning me, not 2cents) had to drag him up the back staircase so he could get sick in the parking lot, not on the table.

Matter of fact, I used to be able to play this song on the guitar from memory.  Sounded better after a few shots, if I recall correctly.  Man, that was a long time ago.

Borepatch 101

New visitors may find themselves here, via some unexpected twisting or turning that happened on Al Gore's Internet Superhighway.  You may wonder just who the heck this idiot is, who runs this joint.

You may be a glutton for punishment, and willing to read more.  That's what this is all about.

I have post categories on the right hand side of the blog - you might want to check the Best Posts category, because they're, well, about the best I can do.  But I've written over 3,000 posts by now, and have almost 150 in the Best Post category, so that would be a lot of reading.

As a (ahem) public service - but mostly because it was fun to do - I've collected several topic areas worth of posts, so you can more easily decide if I'm an idiot or not (BTW, don't forget to browse my Idiots category - it's free!).

Global Warming/Climate Change is something that I post quite frequently about.  I approach the topic from a merging of history and science, which is perhaps a little different than you typically find.  There's quite good reason to be skeptical.

Internet Security is what I've spent my career doing.  It's something of a passion, but often gets too geeky to be useful to most people.  I try to make things easier for the casual Internet user.

I enjoy shooting guns, and think that most Gun Control laws are dumb.  I lay out my reasoning in a bunch of posts on the subject.

The Internet is a strange place, and is making some huge changes to the political system.  It's going to take ten years before we figure out what it is turning politics in to, but it's going to be one heck of an interesting ride.

Sometimes, you just have to laugh.

So there you have it - a quick intro to me.  Old joke:

So enough about me.  Tell me what you think about me!

Thanks to my regular readers for putting up with all of this. 

Borepatch 101: Goofy Stuff

Life is more than ranting about global warming, or incumbents delenda est.  Sometimes life needs a giggle, or belly laugh.

This is a pretty random group of things that I've written (or created) that I think are funny, or things that someone else made that really kicked over my giggle box.

Humor is a window into the soul.  A little creepy, if you think about it.

Fun with Photoshop The Gimp

I don't exactly have crazy 1337 Photoshop skillz, but sometimes it's fun to goof around with it.

The World's Most Dangerous Librarian tells you that you'd better use your Indoor Voice at the library.  Or else.


Which caliber handgun would Apple sell?

When the Obama Administration set up a "Ministry Of Truth" email address that people could use to denounce Counter-Revolutionary Thought Crime, it seemed that there was a great shortage of Bolshevik style posters exhorting the People to comply.  This is my humble attempt to fill that sad void.

My only creation that went viral on the Internet.  I actually think that the Blue Screen Of Death is funnier (in a really Climate-Science geeky way), but it's the other that went viral.

Quality Snark

I'm not Mormon, but I got married in a Mormon church.  This means that the church had my address in their database.  One day, the missionaries came by.  Hilarity ensued.

Internet Security vulnerability announcements get pretty boring sometimes.  I thought it would be worthwhile to, err, fire one up.

"Experts", eh?

Remember, Europeans are so much more cultured than you or me.

Always glad to help out the Oz Police.  No extra charge, mates!

I didn't create it, but Goodnight Keith Moon had me laughing until I cried.

Why the liberals don't form their own militia movement.

The Telemarketers called. Hilarity ensued.

Flotsam and Jetsam

An old Maine story.

A cute programming language.

I'm not evil.  Only partially evil.

We took a Teletubbie to the shooting range.  We didn't know what we were getting ourselves into.

Cookie Monster sings a duet with Ramstein.

Fun with road signs.

I can be quite disappointing sometimes.

Borepatch 101: How the Internet is changing politics

The Internet has disrupted all sorts of business models, so it's no surprise at all that it's reshaping how politics is played.

As a quick disclaimer, my politics is summed up as I'm not a conservative, I'm not a liberal, and I'm not a Libertarian.  I'm not really much of a joiner, it seems.

Your starting point for what follows is here, about the Long Tail of the Internet and how it is changing - or eliminating - old political "Gatekeeping" roles.  Naturally, the gatekeepers don't much like this, but business has been disrupted like this for fifteen years.  It really shouldn't be much of a surprise.

The Internet is massively decentralized, and information is now impossible to control.  This decentralization is driving a political decentralization, as the Top-Down models of the 20th Century collapse under the exposure of their repeated incompetence.  What's interesting is that the view of the Founding Fathers - a fragmentation of power - is getting a new boost from this process.  And "incompetence" is precisely the right word, and the voters know it.

Neither political party knows how to handle this transition.  Both are Top-Down relics of the Industrial Age, and don't know how to deal with the Information Age.  Their model has been not so very different than the ancient barbarian kings, but that doesn't map well to an era when information is freely available.  This flow of information makes it easy to see that the people who supposedly are helped by the current system are actually screwed by it.

So what comes next?  It's hard to say, but culture matters.  The United States will do a lot better than Europe, who is very likely screwed.  As always, history tells us a lot, if we'll just listen.

Borepatch 101: Gun Control

It's hard to think of a political program as counter productive as gun control.  Not only has it entirely failed to achieve any of its stated objectives, it's been terribly damaging - politically - to its chief proponents.

That's a deep pit of FAIL, right there.

Still, the Intellectual Left is committed to gun control, despite the evidence.  Here's why that's a mistake.

"Reasonable" Restrictions

Most gun control proponents don't know anything about guns, so they don't have any good way to know what's "reasonable" and what's not.  Massachusetts' "reasonable" gun control laws very nearly made me a felon, and only alertness on my part prevented this.

Most gun control proponents don't know anything about guns, because all they know is what they read in the press.

It's hard to craft "reasonable" restrictions when you don't even know what a Machine Gun is.

It's about Power, and who defers to whom

Gun control's roots are explicitly racist.  It's very surprising how many leftists do not realize this.  You're not on the Side Of The Angels, guys.

Prosecutors like to win cases and put people in jail.  It's what they're paid for.  Prosecutors like to have lots of laws, so that they can bring felony charges against people that they would otherwise have to charge with minor infractions.  The felony rap hanging over the defendant's head will encourage them to plea to the minor charges.  This helps prosecutors get more convictions with less effort.  It also puts more people in jeopardy of trumped up charges.  Know your place, people.

How Supreme Court gun control precedent was actually created.  Most gun control laws trace their roots back to United States v. Miller in 1939.  The case is unusual, to say the least.

Great Britain is screwed.  Really screwed.  Know your place, people.  To those who say we should "be more like Europe", I don't think so.

How do the Police look at you?  How did they used to look at you?  Know your place, people.

Disarm the victims.

Philosophical Weakness

It's Rousseau's fault.

The question that gun control proponents won't ever answer.

The Evil Eye.

If the First Amendment was treated like the Second Amendment.  And what the Founders thought about the Second Amendment.

Junk Science used to justify Gun Control

Guns don't cause suicide.  The numbers don't lie.

There's actually no link between video games and school shootings.

These aren't mine, but tells you all you need to know about the use and misuse of statistics in these debates.  And the use and abuse of peer-review.

Do Democrats have a Death Wish?

It seems like it's always a party-line vote.

That's some righteous Brand Damage, right there.

Even DailyKos isn't buying it. 

Metaphors

Strange bedfellows.

Tigers vs. Goats. I know which I'll choose to be.

I'll just close with the statement that the Second Amendment is the most revolutionary sentence ever written, and that it's very strange indeed to see people on the Left so enamored of Counter-Revolutionary restrictions on the People.

Borepatch 101: Global Warming

Yes, I know that "Global Warming" is the old label, replaced by "Climate Change", which was in turn replaced with "Climate Disruption".  By the time you read this, it may have been replaced with something else.

Oooooh kaaaaay.  Nice Marketing Spin.

I wasn't trained as a scientist, but I was trained as an engineer (Electrical, thanks for asking!), and while that's not exactly the same thing, it left me very well versed in the Scientific Method.  More importantly (from a Global Warming Climate Change Climate Disruption point of view), I was also trained in history, and minored in ancient and medieval history.  This in fact was my insertion point into this whole brouhaha - reading about how the Medieval Warm Period supposedly wasn't warm triggered that doesn't sound right thoughts in my head.  Then digging into the current state of Climate Science tripped all sorts of science alarms.

So yeah, you can count me as one of those "skeptics".

What do we mean that something is "scientific"?  You should start here, because the core principles of science are easy to understand.  More importantly, it's easy for someone to spin you if you don't understand them.

Global Warming in a nutshell.  This is a high-level overview of the whole situation.

Remember the "Hockey Stick"?  It's what Al Gore used to hype Global Warming in his movie.  You don't hear much about it any more, because it turns out that it's a lot of bunk.  The data was dodgy and the computer program that did the statistical calculations makes hockey stick shaped graphs out of random data - say, the phone numbers in the telephone directory.

Just how many thermometers are used to measure the Earth's temperature?  How many were used 100 years ago?  200?  So how do we know that "1998 was the hottest year in 1000 years"? But Borepatch, I hear you say, surely it can't be that bad!  Sure can.

The word that you will never hear from Global Warming Climate Change Climate Disruption enthusiasts: Treemometers.  Things are interesting when you watch the sausage get made.

Science is about the data (and also about reproduceability).  So how good is the data?  Terrible.  Really terrible. Unbelievably terrible (this one is simply mind-blowing).  It's so bad that NOAA - the government agency that runs the nation's weather stations - doesn't even try to get accurate readings any more.

Did you know that the climate data has been manipulated (it's called "adjusted")?  Did you know that if you just looked at the "raw" (unadjusted) data, there has been no warming at all since 1850?

Skeptics suggest that the temperature record is biased upwards by the "Urban Heat Island" (UHI) effect - that as cities grow, weather stations that had previously been sited in cool meadows now find themselves in the middle of hot asphalt parking lots.  The "consensus" view of Climate Science is that UHI is minor, if it exists at all.  The problem with this poo-poo response is that a sixth grader can show that UHI is real, and serious.

A very large portion of the case for Global Warming comes from computer models.  Just how reliable are these models?  Not very.

What does history tell us about climate?  Quite a bit, actually, and the climate data do not explain this well.  Translation: the climate reconstructions are falsified by historical records.

But what about the "consensus"?  Quite a few scientists are as skeptical of Global Warming as I am. 

So why are so many scientists caught up in what's clearly a pretty shaky hypothesis?  It's almost a religious debate.  And not in a good way.

Bad public policy recommendations based on Global Warming hysteria: starve children, kill pets, "green" electricity that's far dirtier than coal plants.

There are a bunch more posts here, for those of you who are gluttons for punishment.

Borepatch 101: Internet Security

I've been going back through my archives, and am organizing things so that some early posts don't get lost in the mists of time.  Over the next few days, I'll be putting up a series of posts on various topics, which basically highlight a set of posts on the subject.

Assuming that someone could actually learn something from all this verbiage, having it collected in one easy to reach place may be useful.  Or it may not.  In any case, it seems like an interesting experiment.  Please leave your comments as to whether this is useful or a waste of time.

My security posts have evolved over time.  A lot of you comment saying that you like the "Hey, go grab the patch for your Foo application", and so most of my security posts in the last year have been along those lines.  When I first started posting, it wasn't that way at all.  I posted on a lot more wide ranging security topics, and it struck me that it would be a shame for them to get lost in the dusty archives.  Here are a set of early security posts that may be worth your while.


WiFi security for home users.  If you haven't turned on security in your home WiFi device, you know that your neighbors can lock you out of your own network, don't you?  This post walks you through how to turn on WiFi security in a Linksys router (it's pretty much the same for other brands).  What's a little sobering is that I get around 50 page views a day from Google searches for "hack neighbor's wifi".  Don't be that neighbor.

Military threat from InfoWar.  How do you stop an Armored Brigade using computer hackers?  The threat is real, but probably not what you think, or what Hollywood shows.  I hope our Uniformed Services are taking this seriously.  I suspect they are.


Don't bank online from your cell phone.  I used to rant a fair amount about the risks of online banking, and maybe have mellowed a bit in my old age.  However, banking online from your cell phone is an astonishingly bad idea - epic security FAIL that puts your money at significant risk.  Here's why.


Why bridges don't fall down, but programs crash.  Software is a strange beast, but the way we think about things is based on what we've learned from observing physical things.  No wonder Internet security is counter intuitive.

Hacking a bank for fun and profit. Not that you'd ever do that.  The secret, as they say, is don't let a crisis go to waste.

Funny Database tricks.  This post not only contains what IMHO is the funniest Internet security cartoon ever, but the story of how some d00d used that on the tax people.  Heh.

How to hack a classified network. Yes, it's been done.  This isn't about how it was done, it's about why it's possible.  The recent StuxNet worm - was it really Israel hacking Iran? - is only the latest of a series of incidents.

There you go.  Let me know if this is worth doing more.