Gecko Bloggle

Just a quick note so people don’t think I forgot how to count. Yesterday we shopped.  All day.  The kids went to grandma & grandpa’s place for the night, and we shopped the heck outta Vancouver.   Actually, we mostly shopped the heck outta North Vancouver, and a little of the downtown core.

We bought groceries, shopped WalMart (nobody got hurt), shopped MingWo (I think there’s a branch of techie/geek that designs kitchen utensils, and they’re making a *killing* out there, let me just say), we shopped one of those “As Seen On TV” places, and *just* about bought some stuff that I’m sure wouldn’t have made it through lunchtime on December 25th.

Dropped our stuff at home, and headed back out into the night for some steak dinners dinners with a guy that was the mid-30 blonde-ponytail version of John Goodman.   He was awesome, without trying.   I think it was mostly that he was NOT one of those greasy “Hi there, my name’s Kurt, and I’m going to not understand that you’re just here for dinner, not as a redbull-and-vodka-fueled entertainment experience with spinach dip.”  He was just human.  Just a guy who had access to some truly awesome steaks, and was willing to part with them for a fee.

After dinner, we bought our “Our Gift From All Of Us To All Of Us” which Arwen and I had to test out, of course, so we did a little bowling, a little tennis, a little “This is gonna be FUN.”

I returned a call to Visa to tell them that there was no need to freak out, and yes I had in fact just bought dinner for $80 and then electronics four blocks away for $360.  The teller at the Future Shop had put in the wrong expiration date once, which had triggered Visa’s WTF-ometer, so they’d phoned the house to make sure we were cool.   At first, I wondered if that meant we’d accidentally walked out the door without actually PAYING for the stuff we’d bought, but no, it went through the second time.  Oh well, we’ll have to win the raffle some other time.

Then we went to see “Body Of Lies,” which was all about US involvement in Jordan.   Yeehah, right? Action-packed thrillride adventure.   Wheeeee! Ridley Scott directs (Blade Runner, Alien)! Happy-happy-joy-joy! With kittens and balloons, and unicorns that fart rainbows with baskets full of puppies chasing butterflies.

Ahee.

Seriously though, a good movie, but heavy, and long. there was also what seemed like 30 minutes of commercials, many of which were ones we’d seen on TV, so it’s not like we were getting big-screen ultra-rare artsy-fartsy commercials.   Just car ads and things.   Odd.  Also super-duper loud.

Then we came home around 1am to our empty house and went to bed.  We slept in until 10:30am, which is unHEARD of in our house of kids that think 7:00am is sleeping in, and Saturday/Sunday are days they don’t go to school or preschool.  There’s no sleeping in, ever.  Today, coffee was at 11am.

Sure, we blew through a lot of money, but it sure felt like a day off from being responsible parents of two kids.

And normally, I can’t STAND shopping.  Yesterday?  That was a tactical strike, all day.  Good times.  Good times.

This is my 600th post on this incarnation of this blog.  I had another one at Blogger for a while, and I think I have them somewhere, I’ll have to make sure they’re back in my archives.  Maybe another 15 posts or so.  Elissa is over for our quad-weekly visit and Pimms-fest.  Booze-amahol is inherent in this post.

Today my brain kinda went into neutral at work.  I got stuff done, honest.  I got to order a bunch of something that I would normally have shot down, or suspected isn’t really necessary, which translates to “I’m worried they’ll become toys.”  It’s that enough of a sort of purchase that the person at the vendor said “Oh, are these gifts for people at work, like a giveaway?”

I feel like putting stickers on them when they arrive that say “No having fun with this.”  I’m such a grump sometimes.  I’m a hardware junkie like the best of them, but sometimes I feel like people want things because it’ll be fun to have them.  Not because they’re needed for business purposes, but because they’re cool.

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Just caught a commercial for Guitar Hero World Tour (looking suspiciously like some OTHER three-piece band game by another company who simply bought the development company) but here’s the cooperative cross-over from hell:

Kentucky Friend Chicken.

Really? REALLY? Anybody’s who’s ever been passed the five-buttoned Guitar Hero controller immediately after a particularly sweaty-handed rendition of “Welcome to the Jungle” will know why this is a bad idea. Deep-fried chicken and plastic guitar buttons do NOT mix.

Waiting for the other shoe: Pizza and Wii (oh wait, THAT’S why everyone was spanging their controllers off their $3,000 plasma screens).

Of course, I routinely maw down (or is it mow down?) on licorice Goodies (which are recently GOODIER meaning more licorice and less half-crumbly candy stickettes) while sitting in front of my keyboard at work.

Oh, while doing some other stuff, I ran into a design site that has some stuff that nicely blew my mind for a good five minutes.

Part of the (literally) mind blowing Don't Play With Monkey

Oh, and in my days as a desktop technician, I’ve been called on a number of times to do data recovery for drives that have “died,” or are making horrible clicking noises. For the first time (as far as I know), someone has actually collected all the horrible click, grinding, chirping and buzzing noises hard drives make when they’re playing possum. Now, you just go to this site and listen to the various noises and weird pinging that hard drives make, and then explains what’s probably going on with the drive. (via Hack-A-Day). Might not save your data, but saves you from opening your computer case, sticking the phone in there and saying “So, is that bad?” to the guy at Best Buy.

Oh, and never ever ever EVAR take your computer to a place like Future Shop or Best Buy. Seriously, as much as we hate doing support for our friends (because of the whole “last touchies” thing, we generally don’t want to see you get screwed by some jerkwad at the store, who was selling cel phones yesterday.

And now, based on watching Canada’s Worst Driver season 4, I’ve decided that most of these people should just never drive ever again. I mean, the friends/spouses/children of these bad drivers have put them up to this, but I wonder if they can actually just plain call the cops instead, and say “Uh, yeah, you know what? Bob just shouldn’t be driving any more, like, at all.” How do these people get their licenses in the first place?

Sorta like that comedian I heard years ago, who suggested magnetic darts that you could harpoon into other cars who do stupid things, and the cops would automatically pull over anyone with three or more darts. At 10 darts, they just run you off the road.

Porches, Ferraris, and HumVees ship with two permanent darts.

HEY-O!

Oh, and if you’re in a restaurant, with your family, and you have one of those Bluetooth earpiece things in your ear?

That’s a ‘poonin’.

Life on Mars should be a very bad show, based on the elevator pitch:

A cop in present-day New York gets hit by a passing car, and wakes up in 1973, still a cop in New York.  There’s some odd crossover from present day (people he knows in 2008 are younger in 1973), and the occasional anachronism (a kid shows up at some point with a Nirvana tour shirt on).

but it’s not.  I dunno much about it (like who wrote it, or whether or not there was a UK version first), but it’s like a grittier version of Quantum Leap.  I mean that in the best possible way.

Whoa, did you know this about Quantum Leap?

Quantum Leap is an American science fiction television series which ran for 96 episodes from March 1989 to May 1993 on the NBC network. The series was created by Donald P. Bellisario, based on a concept originally created for Galactica 1980. This concept was then reworked outside of the Battlestar Galactica framework.    – The Might Mighty Wikipedia

Well now you do (and doing is half the… wait… that’s wrong).  Now that piece of information is lodged into the same part of your brain that holds infinite amounts of 70s lyrics, you’ll never get that part of your brain working right ever again.  You’re welcome.

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I’m changing the titling so as not to offend KarlaBabble (like SHE ever comes HERE any MORE), but mostly ’cause yeah, I agree that the vast majority of my own “I’m going to write every day for X days” challenges are deeply depressing to myself, ’cause I don’t usually get past day three before skipping a day or two, and then doing one more day, and then giving up, assuming nobody noticed in the first place.

Karla has this to say about it:

Do us all a favor and vow NOT to participate in NaBloPoMo this year. If you’re already committed to it, then at least remove the word “NaBloPoMo” from every post, because that’s like announcing, “This is going to suck” in big letters across the top of the post. Allow us the temporary illusion that you blogged today because you were inspired, and not because there’s a national bore-a-thon going on and you’re determined not to be left out.

This is why I don’t use something like Twitter (or Twittr, or Twitr, or Twtr, or whatevr they’r calling it this wkr,) it’s just too much pressure.  I’m afraid people would actually start to get annoyed by what I’m tweeting.  See?  I’m already annoying myself by talking about it.  Shut UP.

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I used to make this trip to/from work as often as possible (I was shooting for three times a week):

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Now I make this trip, and it takes about 4 minutes (6 if I hit red lights).

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Gotta love a 4 minute commute.
Oh, and since it’s all uphill on the way home, it’s a whopping 10 minutes.

But since I’m doing that EVERY DAY, it’s not going badly.

I’ve only walked to/from work a few times, and those were for medical reasons.

This was going to start as a little piece talking about how much more time I spend at Facebook, but I don’t spend much time AT Facebook, I’ve been spending time chatting with friends VIA Facebook.  See, there’s this chat system, and it’s meant to allow users who are on FB to chat with others on FB, “live.”  It’s their way of keeping you at the site, and hopefully looking at the odd advertisment for whatever it is (I seem to have a well-developed set of side-banner blinders, to the point that I’ve been at “dark underbelly of the web” sites looking for information about a server exploit or something, and had my then-very-young son point at a picture on the sidebar and ask “Where’d that lady’s clothes go?”)

So yeah, so I don’t see the ads, sorry Facebook, sorry Google.  I don’t see ’em.

Even worse though, is that I no-longer even VISIT Facebook any more, since my Blackberry has a Facebook app that handles messages, pokes, photos (including uploading, how “this just in” of me), status updates, and wall posts.  See?  Almost everything you need to do on FB is on my BB.  But no chat.  If I wanted to chat with my FB friends, I had to visit the site.

A few weeks ago, Digsby changed all that.  Digsby handles email notifications, instant messaging, AND Social notifications (including Facebook, including the chat feature).  Don’t need to go there any more.

OH, and it does this weird little chat widget thingie.  I think it’s over on the right there somewhere, right?

Yeah, pretty hip.

So, I’m going to try to write a little more about all the nerdy stuff that’s going on.  I’m learning things again, and that’s good.  I wasn’t learning much at EA any more.  There were things I didn’t know (believe me), but I wasn’t learning any more, ’cause I was too busy writing up documentation for people who wouldn’t read it, so when they freaked out that the latest version of something was (omigod) DIFFERENT, we could try to defend ourselves by showing glossy versions of what was freely and widely available in the way of documentation online.  Sad.

Whew, was that a bitter moment?

Yeah, so if you hit my Delicious list, you’ll see what sorts of things I’ve been linking/saving, including Timbap, which is this crazy “plug a turntable into your computer and then put a timecoded record on the platter, and BOOM, you’ve got the ability to play MP3s…” thing, and I was like “I can spin MP3s on my computer and my turntable for $12 instead of $250?” until I realized that it was just a way to SELECT MP3s and then hit play.  Not a way to control how fast they play (at least, I don’t think so).

What else?  Oh yeah, I went to NewType Computer Workshop and playing with an ASUS EEEPC, which was a sorta-failed attempt at making a laptop for kids.  They crazy cheap (most models under $400), very small, reasonably fast, and look sorta like the big brother to a Nintendo DS (not the Lite, but the big plastic & MarioKart style).  I tried it out for a minute or two, and thought this is really cool, if I was about 30% smaller, all over.  It’s a neat machine, but I am too big for it.  My fingers wouldn’t really ever get “fast” on one of these things, and I didn’t see a mouse for it, so control of the mouse would be non-existant.  All in all, a cute device, but not something an old Road Worrier like me would use to keep in touch with the office.  I have a Blackberry for that, I guess, and I can type pretty quickly on that, so I’m good.

I’ll have to check out Dell’s new “E” series laptops when they hit the shelves.

What kinda nerdery are YOU folks up to?

Okay, riddle me this, Apple Fans:

Let’s say I have a list of 26 songs (let’s call them “A” through “Z”) in iTunes, and I want to select *some* of them. I click on the beginning of my selection (let’s say “L”) hold down shift, and start cursoring down to select “M, N, O, P” and keep going until I hit “S,” but through the magic of poor reflexes, I actually go one more line to “T.” I now have L throught T selected in a highlighted range that’s one more file than I wanted.

With me so far?

So, everyone think about what you would like to THINK would be the way to unselect the T track. Don’t answer me yet. Just keep it in your head for a second.

I, as a old fogey user of Paperclip, Geos, Windows, OpenOffice, WP51Dos, and freakin’ Nano user do the following:

Keeping the shift key down, I hit cursor up.

Can someone PLEASE explain to me why the range increases above my current selected range, to now include K? T is still selected.

Really? K? That’s what people tend to do? Click somewhere in the middle of the range they want to select and then hit cursor-up/down to select in both directions? REALLY?

I mean, c’mon. Who asked for that?

Maybe it’s only in iTunes under Windows, but somehow I doubt it.

And I’m looking at you too, Microsoft/Logitech.

F-Lock. F-Lock?

Let’s make the default of the function keys something OTHER than their normal response? BRILLIANT! A round of Nobel prizes, for my FRIENDS who came up with this. Thanks so much for dooming 5 years worth of my fellow technicians to having to hit F-Lock (to put the functions keys BACK to their initial setting) and then F1, F2, F6, F8, or F11 to choose their boot/setup options.

Oh, and you have to do that during the two seconds of the POST (Power On. See? Tease!) when you’re allowed to do anything other than go back into Windows again.

Pfft. F-lock. I mean, really.

So Arwen and I were Googling “don’t irritate your new boss” looking for the source of this creepy baby picture on the back of a parenting mag, and found this utterly weird translation page… about gardening… or something… I think.

It’s like I was warned about a certain psychedelic experience many many years ago:

It’s big in there.

Here’s the “text” on the site, and thanks/apologies to Pinkkuma03.

不過不是要講這個
是說我昨天貼那篇
“不要惹怒你的新老闆” 的平面廣告 “Don’t irritate your new boss.”
其實下面還有一行字
溫和及完全的清潔敏感的肌膚
“Gentle and thorough cleaning for sensitive skin.”
這才是真正的笑點
襯托出上面那個 “irritate”
成為雙關語(pun)

irritate 惹怒 使不愉快的 不舒服的

這樣一講其實也不好笑了….

So Microsoft quietly released a USB drive to a bunch of law-enforcement officers to allow them to collect data (passwords, Internet history, cookies, etc) from “live” Windows machines. While this is “breaking news” today (probably more now, but this search only showed two pages on Google as of this morning), it seems that people have been talking about it since (at least) last year, and it’s almost May now.

Many people are freaking out that Windows’ security can be so easily defeated, which shouldn’t really be news to anyone when you’re standing in front of the machine. This is not some magic key that the police have that will allow them to breach every firewall on the planet and steal your secrets. So relax a little. If the police are standing in front of your computer, you’ve probably got bigger problems than them stealing your surfing history.

The biggest theft of data I personally know about was a server that was stolen from a Vancouver Law Firm of Note because someone with a hand-cart told the receptionist they were “here to work on the computers,” walked through the accounting department, opened the sliding glass doors to the server room, unplugged the primary document server, and rolled it back out the front door. Nobody knew anything untoward was happening untilthe System Administrator started getting “I can’t save” phone calls. Their firewall and security didn’t help them against a simple “walk up and take it” approach.

Physical breach of a workstation pretty-much guarantees loss of security/privacy.

Here’s some questions I have about this Cofee thing:

1. Remember when some people started bashing crypto groups with a “What do you have to hide, are you doing something illegal?” argument? Maybe those same folks are running to the nearest BestBuy and trying to buy “strong” security software. I’ve got news for you folks: if you can BUY it, and it’s not OpenSource, chances are extremely freakin’ high the People In Charge already have keys for that, too.
2. Do you really think Joe Consumer will switch to Ubuntu because maybe the cops can get at their surfing history?
3. Don’t you think similar toolkits exist for Linux/Mac?
4. What constitutes a “search” and whether or not they’ll need to convince a judge that it’s justified to pop one of these thumb drives into your machine for 30 seconds. They’re not *doing* anything to your computer, just popping a drive in there for a second.
5. What happens if you’ve got a visitor kiosk in the lobby of your office, attached to the network, and someone pops one of these drives into an exposed USB port (not that there would *be* any, of course).
6. How is the data that’s been collected protected against tampering/theft?
7. What’s to stop people from writing a “De-COFEE” utility that’ll look for signs that the USB drive inserted is a COFEE device, and simply wipe it, or inject something that’ll do horrible things to the law enforcement systems they’re later plugged into?
8. What’s to stop a “Wipe local drive upon COFEE detection” utility?
9. Expressed in minutes, how long do you think it’ll be before this kit’s utility set accidentally finds its way onto the Net?
10. …in hours, how long before I start getting comments on this blog about Linux-based USB drives that’ll perform EXACTLY the same function?
11. …in days, how long before there’s a new MSN-messenger-based Trojan that’ll do the same thing?

Maybe this’ll mean that they’ll have a standard method of collecting information about what is being done with a particular computer, instead of the current rather haphazard methodology that’s being used, which essentially means conviction (deserved or not) is based on how computer-savvy the local police detachment happens to be, and whether or not they can tell a usb drive from a book.

All in all, I think it’s a good thing, and I think the backlash against it, and the overall strengthening of everyone’s tools will be a positive thing.