Weird stuff going on

Not good weird.  Back later.

Austin meetup

If you're in the area, pencil in the evening of Wednesday, May 21 out by Lake Travis.  Details to follow.

¡Feliz Cinco de Cuatro!

Smartest. President. Ever.

President Obama greeted a White House crowd this afternoon gathered for a May 4 premature celebration of Cinco de Mayo, the Mexican holiday honoring an upset military victory over the French, whose troops didn't do so well in North America and don't celebrate the same day much.

Anyway, in a well-intentioned attempt at Spanish and a joke about being a day early, Obama said:

"Bienvenidos. Welcome to Cinco de Cuatro -- (laughter) -- Cinco de Mayo at the White House. We are a day early, but we always like to get a head start here at the Obama White House."

Apparently unbeknownst to the president he wasn't saying "Happy May 4th." He was saying, Happy fifth of fourth."

But don't forget, Sarah Palin is too stupid to be Vice President! [rolls eyes]

You see, this is why we can't have nice things on the Internet

It seems like it's more common than you think.  Fortunately, you can download something onto your computer to deal with it.

Jesus wept.

Who's up for an Austin meetup?

The great thing about working for a videoconferencing company is that you don't have to travel much.  But I've been so successful "exercising influence" the last few weeks that there are now so many balls in the air that something's likely to drop.  It's to the point that I'm pulling together a meeting in 2 or 3 weeks so that we can hash this out face to face.

In Austin.

Who out there is up for an evening meetup?  Date is likely sometime the week of the 19th, probably middle of the week.  Venue is open, although I wouldn't mind meeting out by Lake Travis, out of sentimental reasons (that's where my crib used to be).

In particular, I somehow missed meeting Cap'n Jan out there, and would love to fix that.  Plus it would be cool to link back up with Dwight, Pistolero, Lawrence, and the croud.

Yeah, I've been tired

Played hookey today.

Actually, Crash the Wondercat also haz a tired because he got out today.  We keep him indoors (much to his annoyance) partly because there are a lot of coyotes around here, but mostly because we got him from the shelter after he'd run off.  I would be plumb out of Wondercats if he ran off, and so I'm quite happy that he's back and curled up next to me.

Rachmaninoff: Pianoconcerto no.2 op.18

Image via Il Wik

This is the first piano, made in 1722 by Bartolomeo Cristofori di Francesco in Florence.  Actually, it's not the first, but it is the oldest surviving piano in its original (i.e. unaltered) state.  It appears that Cristoforihad been making pianos at least by 1700, and so this is fairly late in his career.

These early pianos were expensive to make, and so were only purchased by the nobility.  They were also much lighter in construction than modern pianos, and so were not very loud - softer than the harpsichord.

But the beginning is but the beginning, and we all know how this has played out over the last three centuries as the piano has become perhaps the most popular home instrument in the world and has given rise to music like this, perhaps the greatest piece ever composed for piano.



Bartolomeo Cristofori was born on this day in 1655.

Howlin' Wolf - Highway 49

Everyone's done this song - George Thorogood's version is particularly kick-ass - but nobody is in the same league as Howlin' Wolf.

The left has lost the young generation

The explicit distrust of power and implicit libertarianism of the new Call Of Duty trailer is an effect, it's not a cause.  But the two are twinned in a self-reinforcing cycle of anti-authoritarianism.  That's a big problem for the left.  As they used to say, how you going to keep 'em down on the farm when they've seen Paree?

Damn. Shoulda got this phone

The best part is the popup when you hover the mouse over the picture.  You have to click through to the original for that.

Top 10 stupid arguments from climate skeptics

It's important to be self-critical, to keep yourself from wandering off into the fever swamps.  I must confess that I was a little worried when I saw this from Dr. Roy Spencer (major league climate scientist) - after all, I'm pretty skeptical here, pretty regularly.  Fortunately, it looks like I haven't spouted any of these.

Worth a read.  Spencer is a skeptic, but he's also a scientist.  That's actually a good combination.

Jo Dee Mesinna - Biker Chick

Not all women like motorcycles, or guys who ride them.  They're missing out, especially when the weather is as beautiful as it is today.  This song isn't deep or profound, just fun.



Biker Chick

Me and the girls out after work
Drinkin' marguaritas one night
After a few, the conversation turned to
The kind of guys we like

One only dates doctors, one likes cowboys
And one prefers the sensitive kind
Well, I really shocked 'em then
All jaws were droppin' when
It came turn to tell 'em mine

I like a man with a tan and a twisted chrome kickstand
Leanin' on a big old bike
The low rollin' sound that'll shake the ground
Comin' out of long pipes
I like a tattoo or two
Or even more if they're cool
On the big old arms of a long-haired dude
Inside of me, there's an all I wanna be
Biker chick chick
Biker chick chick (whooo)
(Biker chick)
(Biker chick chick)
(Biker chick chick, whooo)

I never rode on the back of an old
Chopper down the highway
Holdin' on tight just him and I
Makin' our getaway
I've always been the good girl
Walked the straight and narrow path all my life, boo

But the tequila's kickin' in
And since I'm here with friends
Can't a girl just fantasize

I like a man with a tan and a twisted chrome kickstand
Leanin' on a big old bike
The low rollin' sound that'll shake the ground
Comin' out of long pipes
I like a tattoo or two
Or even more if they're cool
On the big old arms of a long-haired dude
Inside of me, there's an all I wanna be
Biker chick chick
Biker chick chick (whooo)
(Biker chick)
(Biker chick chick)
(Biker chick chick, whooo)

Pants on fire

Why the hell is this interview done by Comedy @#$% Central?



If there is ever a likely place for an outbreak of a crotch fire, it's in General Alexander's trousers.

You want to know why we can't have nice things on the Internet?

This is why we can't have nice things on the Internet.

Every f'n word is from his mouth to God's ears.  It starts with awesome:

Every friend I have with a job that involves picking up something heavier than a laptop more than twice a week eventually finds a way to slip something like this into conversation: "Bro, you don't work hard. I just worked a 4700-hour week digging a tunnel under Mordor with a screwdriver."

But then it dials the awesome up to eleven, and never looks back.  This is particularly good too, about the state of the code we run:

[Lots about a crummy-bridge-designed-by-a-disfunctional-organization stuff deleted]

Would you drive across this bridge? No. If it somehow got built, everybody involved would be executed. Yet some version of this dynamic wrote every single program you have ever used, banking software, websites, and a ubiquitously used program that was supposed to protect information on the internet but didn't.

Yup.  And this describes my life during the last two or three weeks:

Remember that stuff about crazy people and bad code? The internet is that except it's literally a billion times worse. Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone. Right now someone who works for Facebook is getting tens of thousands of error messages and frantically trying to find the problem before the whole charade collapses. There's a team at a Google office that hasn't slept in three days. Somewhere there's a database programmer surrounded by empty Mountain Dew bottles whose husband thinks she's dead. And if these people stop, the world burns. Most people don't even know what sysadmins do, but trust me, if they all took a lunch break at the same time they wouldn't make it to the deli before you ran out of bullets protecting your canned goods from roving bands of mutants.

This is the most breathlessly cynical (and true) reflection of the State Of Things since Myers-Briggs met office politics.  Go RTW damn T - there's more, so very much more.  Yes, this is exactly why Internet security sucks infected canal water.  If you are remotely involved with tech, you have got to go read the whole cynical, glorious thing.  Especially the summing up:

So no, I'm not required to be able to lift objects weighing up to fifty pounds. I traded that for the opportunity to trim Satan's pubic hair while he dines out of my open skull so a few bits of the internet will continue to work for a few more days.

Oh. My. God.  This is the funniest thing I've read in weeks.  And every word is 100 proof distilled truth.

Windows XP users - Microsoft is fixing your Interner Explorer browser

That's how dangerous this bug is: even with XP off of support, they are doing an out-of-cycle patch to fix it:

Microsoft announced it will release an out-of-band security update today to patch a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer, and that the patch will also be made available for Windows XP machines through Automatic Update. At the same time, researchers said they are now seeing attacks specifically targeting XP users.

Microsoft no longer supports XP as of April 8, and that includes the development and availability of security updates. But the about-face today speaks to the seriousness of the vulnerability, which is being exploited in limited targeted attacks, Microsoft said.

“The security of our products is something we take incredibly seriously. When we saw the first reports about this vulnerability we decided to fix it, fix it fast, and fix it for all our customers,” said Adrienne Hall, General Manager, Microsoft Trustworthy Computing.

Well done to Microsoft - they have a good security team there (I know a bunch of them), and this is a reflection of that team strength.  Patching 12 year old code is no fun, but they did it.

If you are still running XP, get this update even if you don't use IE.  We'll all forget about this in a few weeks, and someone might run the old IE app sometime in the future.  Microsoft has a page on turning on automatic updates in XP.

But don't get used to this, because they won't repeat this often.  You'll need to move to Windows 7, or Mac, or Linux.  Recent advice found here.

Yikes

Work has been crazy busy with this Heartbleed security problem.  It's been busy at home as well, albeit (and fortunately) not like it was a few weeks back.

But I completely borked today's scheduled posts - the timing was simply whacked.  That's what can happen after you wrap up a conference call at 21:30 during a couple of long weeks.

As an apology to my loyal readers, all posts today will be free of charge.  Hopefully tomorrow will be saner.  Now it's beer o'clock.

RCOB moment

Woman runs over kid and kills him.  Then she sued the kid's parents for pain and suffering:

ALCONA, ONT. - Still in the throes of agony from losing their son in a vehicle crash, the parents of young Brandon Majewski are now reeling after they learned the woman who struck and killed him is suing their dead child.

Sharlene Simon, 42, a mother of three, formerly from Innisfil Canada is not officially the worst human being on the planet.  Die screaming in a fire, Sharlene.

"Groundhog Day is a better movie than the Torah"

Harold Ramis was not dissing the Torah.  Embedding is disabled, but this is a very, very insightful discussion on what may be my favorite movie.  This is perhaps my favorite scene:



Because it's more than just learning 19th Century French Poetry to impress a girl.  It's the journey that matters, not so much the destination.  Worth watching again, just like reading the Torah (or the Gospels, or your favorite holy book) each year is worth it.  It's a journey, one that none of us will likely see completed in our mortal lives.

Happy "International Victims Of Communism" Day!

Come the Revolution, you'll be killed.  One book banned is a tragedy; a million books banned is a statistic.

Rammstein - Der Meister

Work's been interesting what with this Heartbleed vulnerability.  Seems I've been able to herd all the cats that needed herding.  Meisterful work, you might say ...