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Jeber If you appreciate the beauty of nature like I do, get on over to Sam’s Flickr page and look at this photo in full size. It leaves me nearly speechless, but thankfully still able to blog.
“Shot at Toronto’s Centre Island. A great example of being in the right place at the right time. “
I’ll say.
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Jeber 
(Thanks to Robert Scoble for the link)
| 2.5 |
Jeber I’ve had quite a few dog companions over the last three decades, but never one as special as Cleo.
This morning we walked up to the local Starbucks so I could get some coffee and Cleo could receive all the attention she always gets from anyone who passes by. She’s incredibly well behaved, waiting patiently while I get my dose of java.
When she accompanies me to work, she has her own bed where she’s happy to snooze in between walks and greeting customers. Whether at the store or at Starbucks she instantly wins friends and receives all the attention a puppy could want.
| 2.5 |
Jeber I’ve been a Michael Blieden fan since I first saw Melvin Goes to Dinner. Next to Jerome Bixby (The Man from Earth) Michael is one of the best writers of natural dialogue I know. He’s also a major comedic writer. Here’s a sample:
Want more? Check out Guacamole.
| 3.0 |
Jeber Perhaps Michelle Obama should reconsider her comment in light of this:
Our President
I can’t decide if Boy George is making a gang sign (the D.C. “Old rich white guys who get away with everything” gang) or indicating his IQ (3 fingers and a zero=30). I also wonder if Chinese beer is more potent than our domestic varieties.
He should ask the Pope to teach him how to do this. He’s halfway there.
I can see you sinning
| 3.0 |
Jeber In a statement made to reporters earlier this afternoon, local idiot Brandon Mylenek, 26, announced that at approximately 2:30 a.m. tonight, he plans to post an idiotic comment beneath a video on an Internet website.
Mylenek, a moron, prepares to publicly address the “dumbest shiz [he's] evr seen!!!1!”
“Later this evening, I intend to watch the video in question, click the ‘reply’ link above the box reserved for user comments, and draft a response, being careful to put as little thought into it as possible, while making sure to use all capital letters and incorrect punctuation,” Mylenek said. “Although I do not yet know exactly what my comment will entail, I can say with a great degree of certainty that it will be incredibly stupid.”
Mylenek, who rarely in his life has been capable of formulating an idea or opinion worth the amount of oxygen required to express it, went on to guarantee that the text of his comment would be misspelled to the point of incomprehension, that it would defy the laws of both logic and grammar, and that it would allege that several elements of the video are homosexual in nature.
“The result will be an astonishing combination of ignorance, offensiveness, and sheer idiocy,” Mylenek said.
Pressed for further details regarding his intended post, Mylenek, who will comment under the Internet pseudonym “xblingdaddy2005x,” revealed that there is a strong possibility he will inadvertently post the comment twice.
“After clicking the ’submit’ button, I will immediately refresh the page so that I can view my own comment. I will then notice that my comment has not appeared because the server has not yet processed my request, become angry and confused, and re-post the same comment with unintentional variations on the original wording and misspellings, creating two slightly different yet equally moronic comments,” he said. “It is my hope that this will illustrate both my childlike level of impatience and my inability to replicate a simple string of letters and symbols 30 seconds after having composed it.”
Mylenek confirmed rumors that he will be momentarily sidetracked by another inane task while drafting his comment. The distraction is scheduled to come at 2:25 a.m. in the form of a “related video” link featuring a man being sodomized by a horse, which Mylenek will re-watch seven times and laugh obnoxiously at with his friend and fellow idiot, Steve Blanchette, 28.
“Once this minor diversion is complete, I will finish posting my comment, then sit there like the worthless human being I am and wait for other commenters to respond,” he added. “Because, as I mentioned before, I have nothing better to do with my life.”
“We are blessed to be living in an age when we have a global communications network in which idiots, assholes, and total and complete wastes of fucking human life alike can come together to give instant feedback in an unfettered and unmonitored online environment,” Mylenek said. “What better way to take advantage of this incredible technology than to log onto the Internet and insult a complete stranger?”
Mylenek concluded his press conference with a solemn vow to uphold the awful, unintelligible, anger-inducing quality of his past Internet comments. (Source, the Onion)
I’m still LMAO.
| 3.0 |
Jeber I guess I need to stop talking about Chris so much…
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Jeber Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.
This text circulated on the internet in September 2003. I first became aware of it when a journalist contacted a my colleague Sian Miller on 16th September, trying to track down the original source. It’s been passed on many times, and in the way of most internet memes has mutated along the way. It struck me as interesting - especially when I received a version that mentioned Cambridge University! I work at Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, in Cambridge, UK, a Medical Research Council unit that includes a large group investigating how the brain processes language. If there’s a new piece of research on reading that’s been conducted in Cambridge, I thought I should have heard of it before…
I’ve written this page, to try to explain the science behind this meme. There are elements of truth in this, but also some things which scientists studying the psychology of language (psycholinguists) know to be incorrect.
| 3.0 |
Jeber 
San Diego Comic-Con
First I admit to being aware that the official title should be typed as “Comic-Con” but I prefer my shortened version. Admit it, you knew what I meant, didn’t you?
Today was a day of firsts. This was my first Comicon, and to get there (since I had no desire to spend 3 hours trying to find parking in downtown San Diego) I took my first trolley ride.
That last first is a bit ironic. When the city started trolley service I was a security supervisor for the service yard. I saw the trolleys inside and out, I just never rode in one, until today.
Even though I collected comic books as a kid (and sold my collection in the 80s), I was never a fanatic. I read mostly DC comics but never had a particular favorite. I didn’t attend past Comicons because I was under the false impression it was a convention for buyers and sellers of comic book and related merchandise. There was certainly a lot of that going on, but it wasn’t the sole activity.
I enjoyed the booths and schwag. I attended eight years of Sam Goody conventions as a store manager and with the movie and music studios offering freebies at every meeting, I’ve become adept at collecting schwag.
But most of all I enjoyed the panels. I missed seeing perhaps my favorite group, Joss Whedon and the cast of Firefly/Serenity. But I was consoled by being able to attend the Browncoat’s panel. Felicia Day, one of the leads in the recent web phenomena Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog showed up to read a fairy tale in support of Kids Need to Read (www.kidsneedtoread.org).
Felicia Day
I’m a writer, and most writers I know, both novice and professional, are also avid readers. Writing would have little value if there were no readers.
What better venue than a convention dedicated to the printed form to encourage reading among kids.
From the Kids Need to Read handout:
Kids Need to Read holds weekly auctions of items generously donated by its supporters. They (the auctions) have proven very popular among fans of Firefly/Serenity and science fiction, as well as literacy advocates.
Auctions have included signed sci-fi memorabilia, book packages, and even character-inspired jewelry.
http://community.kidsneedto read.org
Kids Need to Read distributes books to schools and libraries that might otherwise not be able to afford them. It was established by PJ Haarsma, the author of the Softwire series, and Nathan Fillion, star of both the Dr. Horrible production and Firefly/Serenity.
Support Kids Need to Read, donate your carefully read books to your local school or library. Read to your kids. Do whatever you can to ensure we won’t produce a generation of illiterates. Reading is fundamental to thinking, and thinking adds value to our lives. Give children the gift of reading comprehension. It’s a gift that will continue to reward them throughout their lives.
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Jeber 
Today is Chris Pirillo’s birthday. If you’re new to the internet or have just emerged from a cave, here’s a brief introduction;
Chris Pirillo (born July 26, 1973(1973-07-26) in Des Moines, Iowa) is the founder and maintainer of Lockergnome. He spent two years hosting the TechTV television program Call for Help before parting ways with the company. He also hosted the first annual Call-for-Help-a-Thon on TechTV. He now hosts videos on several internet sites, including CNN.com, YouTube and his own website. (Wikipedia)
Chris was born the year after I graduated from high school. That means today he is 35 and I’m as old as dirt.
By virtue of my advanced age I was a geek while Chris was still learning to go potty by himself. In 1976 I was working with a Cray supercomputer and various in-house built systems at the National Security Agency as a member of the Army Security Agency.
Chris, though, was busy learning all about technology, gaining the knowledge he would later employ to help others find their way on the newly created information superhighway.
Chris had already made a place for himself on the internet by the time I got involved in personal computers. He had a successful email newsletter, had written a book and started an online community forum for those who needed answers to their cyber-questions. The forum was where I first encountered this whirling dervish of all things tech.
Since joining the forum I’ve unashamedly followed Chris around the web, getting involved with nearly every activity he’s started. I do so because I admire Chris on both a professional level and a personal level.
Not only is he a walking knowledge base of Windows (and now Macintosh) systems and online communication, he uses every venue imaginable to share that knowledge with everyone.
In the personal, non-tech world he’s a wonderfully compassionate person. When I couldn’t find a way to attend my dad’s funeral a couple of years ago, Chris made it possible. He’s been a true friend on so many levels that if he were to retire from the internet tomorrow I would still count him as one of my few close friends.
And yet I still have never met him in person.
Chris is a class act.
The internet is a complex world. Chris has dedicated himself and his vast Lockergnome enterprise to making that world more comprehensible to the rest of us.
Head on over to his web page and wish him a Happy Birthday.
| 3.0 |
Jeber I hope not because I’ll be there this Sunday.
Like wannabe Dark Knights answering the call of the “bat signal,” throngs of grown men wearing tights and capes converge this week to revel in all manner of superhero lore and merchandising at the 39th annual Comic Con Convention.
More than 125,000 people are expected to attend the four-day event, which opens Thursday, to indulge in a veritable feast of the latest in comic-related books, movies, toys, games and memorabilia.
(Reuters)
No tights or cape, I’ll be dressed more like Bruce Wayne than Batman. Lacking x-ray vision, I’ll be relying on video and digital cameras to take in the festivities.
I’d enjoy meeting any of you attending the Con. Let’s hook up via Twitter or Brightkite.
| 3.0 |
I’ll be updating my blogs to Word Press 2.6 sometime today.
If everything simply disappears you’ll know why.
Jeber I recently picked a new primary care doctor. After two visits and exhaustive lab tests, he said I was doing ‘fairly well’ for my age. A little concerned about that comment, I couldn’t resist asking him, ‘Do you think I’ll live to be 85?’ He asked, ‘Do you smoke tobacco, or drink beer or wine?’ ‘Oh no,’ I replied. ‘I’m not doing drugs, either!’ Then he asked, ‘Do you eat rib-eye steaks, barbecued ribs or Sausage?’ I said, ‘No, my former doctor said that all red meat is very unhealthy!’ ‘Do you spend a lot of time in the sun, like playing golf, boating, hiking, or bicycling?’ ‘No, I don’t,’ I said. He asked, ‘Do you gamble, drive fast cars, ride a Harley or have a lot of sex?’ ‘No,’ I said. He looked at me and said,
‘Then, why do you even give a shit?’
(posted by emmas on Tumblr)
I heartily agree. I’d rather burn out at 65 from living life to its fullest than slowly decompose for 85 years avoiding all risk and adventure.
| 1.8 |
Jeber In the July 5, 1993 issue of The New Yorker, a Peter Steiner cartoon revealed a truism.
The cartoon was funny, but the message it conveyed turned out to be one of the most valuable features of the internet.
Suddenly no one could judge you (with the implied and find you wanting) based on your age or gender or race. You could recreate yourself as an avatar of your mind. Everyone you ever met in cyberspace would only know the you that you allowed to be known, and nothing would be more the eYou than the words you used, the thoughts you typed out for us to read.
Those of us who for years have been humanists, believers in the basic decency of humanity, saw this next medium of communication as a real chance for people around the world to share their common humanity with anyone else with whom they could connect. It would no longer matter if you were a poor child in Vietnam or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. The quality of your mind would be the leveler. Here was a means for people to get to know each other at a less superficial level than judging them by their age, gender or race. We were idealists.
“Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist” George Carlin
There’s talk around the internets about racism again. Many of us have spent years objecting to and rallying against racism. The internet gave us a reason to hope racism would quickly disappear from the mind-pool. Once race was no longer obvious or easily discerned, it would cease being of any importance. We further hoped this race-ignorant attitude would speedily spread throughout the real world. We may have been overly optimistic.
Louis Gray has written up the latest chapter in this sad saga on his blog, LouisGray.com. If you want to delve deeper into this situation, check out the conversations on Friendfeed.
It’s good that these conversations are taking place. Racism, like sexism, shouldn’t be allowed to avoid scrutiny. Those of us who find racism ignorant need to speak out against its infection of the internet. The racists should be held accountable for their attitudes.
Freedom of speech? I’m all for it. Being held responsible for the attitudes you espouse? I insist on it.
The internet still has the potential to help humanity evolve to the next level. We can leave behind our less-than-noble fears and superstitions (the breeding ground for racism) and let the internet guide our real lives. See others for who they are, not what they are.
The alternative isn’t good.
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Jeber From the Internet Systems Consortium:
Summary:
A weakness in the DNS protocol may enable the poisoning of caching recursive resolvers with spoofed data. DNSSEC is the only full solution. New versions of BIND provide increased resilience to the attack.
Description:
Thanks to recent work by Dan Kaminsky of IOActive, ISC has become aware of a potential attack exploiting weaknesses in the DNS protocol itself. (Full details of the vulnerability will be explained by Kaminsky at the Black Hat conference on August 7th.) The weakness is inherent to the DNS protocol and not specific to any single implementation. The DNS protocol uses the Query ID field to match incoming responses to previously sent queries. The Query ID field is only 16 bits, which makes it an easy target to exploit in the particular spoofing scenario described by Kaminsky.
Impact:
ANYONE RUNNING BIND AS A CACHING RESOLVER IS AFFECTED.
Immediate action required:
IF YOU ARE RUNNING BIND AS A CACHING RESOLVER YOU NEED TO TAKE ACTION.
DNSSEC is the only definitive solution for this issue. Understanding that immediate DNSSEC deployment is not a realistic expectation, ISC is releasing patched versions of BIND that improve its resilience against this attack. The method used makes it harder to spoof answers to a resolver by expanding the range of UDP ports from which queries are sent, thereby increasing the variability of parameters in outgoing queries.
YOU ARE ADVISED TO INSTALL EITHER THE PATCHES (9.5.0-P1, 9.4.2-P1, 9.3.5-P1) OR THE NEW BETA RELEASES (9.5.1b1, 9.4.3b2) IMMEDIATELY.
The patches will have a noticeable impact on the performance of BIND caching resolvers with query rates at or above 10,000 queries per second. The beta releases include optimized code that will reduce the impact in performance to non-significant levels.
DNS administrators who operate these servers behind port-restricted firewalls are encouraged to review their firewall policies to allow this protocol-compliant behavior. Restricting the possible use of various UDP ports, for instance at the firewalls, in outgoing queries and the corresponding replies will result in decreased security for the DNS service.
Again, DNSSEC is the definitive solution to this type of attack. ISC strongly encourages DNS administrators to deploy DNSSEC as soon as possible to fully address this problem. DNS domain owners that want their data to be protected against spoofing to the end-user must sign their zones. ISP and Enterprise DNS administrators who provide caching recursive name servers to their users should enable DNSSEC validation.
DNSSEC Lookaside Validation (DLV), offered by ISC and others, is another DNSSEC deployment option.
| 2.1 (1 person) |
Jeber The biggest story to break this week will likely receive little mainstream attention. It may not even interest a great number of people. I mean, it’s all so geeky and weird, what do all those strange terms mean?
Even Lou Luddite would agree that like it or not, computers, networks and the internet form a real infrastructure within our society from top to bottom. From bank to boardroom, we depend on the internet and our local networks in the same way we depend on our other utilities; it’s just supposed to work. We don’t have to reboot the refrigerator (yet), when we turn the tap we expect water. When we open our browser we expect to find the internet, just the way we left it.
Recently our relationship to the internet was threatened not by thieves but by a flaw. An error (found and corrected) could have allowed hackers to cause massive mayhem on anyone using the internet.
Many people were involved in this effort, and I applaud them all.
Internet flaw could let hackers take over the Web
Computer industry heavyweights are hustling to fix a flaw in the foundation of the Internet that would let hackers control traffic on the World Wide Web.
Major software and hardware makers worked in secret for months to create a software “patch” released on Tuesday to repair the problem, which is in the way computers are routed to web page addresses.
“It’s a very fundamental issue with how the entire addressing scheme of the Internet works,” Securosis analyst Rich Mogul said in a media conference call.
“You’d have the Internet, but it wouldn’t be the Internet you expect. (Hackers) would control everything.”
The flaw would be a boon for “phishing” cons that involve leading people to imitation web pages of businesses such as bank or credit card companies to trick them into disclosing account numbers, passwords and other information.
Attackers could use the vulnerability to route Internet users wherever they wanted no matter what website address is typed into a web browser.
“People should be concerned but they should not be panicking,” Kaminsky said. “We have bought you as much time as possible to test and apply the patch. Something of this scale has not happened before.”
Kaminsky built a web page, DoxPara Research, where people can find out whether their computers have the DNS vulnerability. (Source)
| 1.8 |
Jeber Then I might know what these plant are. Check out my Flickr set and let me know if you can help me identify these two little fellows.
Both were given to me about 5 years ago. Every Winter they drop their leaves and hibernate. Every spring they put out new leaves. One has leaves that remind me of a tree, while the other has thick leaves reminiscent of a succulent.
| 1.8 |
Jeber Any dog or cat who has been at the shelter over 30 days is now FREE for a limited time!
In addition, any dog over 5 years old, or cat over 6 months old is FREE.
You must show valid ID and fill out the application forms.
www.sddac.com
(Posted to Craigslist/San Diego)
| 1.8 |
Jeber
It’s a greater force than we often realize.
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