December 2005 Archives
[Moozik: Skinny Puppy - Chainsaw]
Hmmm, it appears that out of The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 years, I've owned 10 of them in my lifetime.
[Moozik: Stone Temple Pilots - Sour Girl]
Well that was all over very quickly wasn't it? Nice 5 day break but now it's back to work again. Sigh. Rather quiet in the office though. Lots of people using up their last days of vacation this week. Mental note to self, make sure you save a few days to do the same thing next year :-)
Had a good Christmas actually. They say you should eat, drink, and be merry and to be honest, who am I to argue with that :-) Guinness, yummm. Got some nice prezzies from Father Christmas and have plenty of video game playing, music listening, and DVD watching to keep me amused for a month or so. And of course, as is the tradition every year, we spent about 20 minutes playing with the cats & dogs in opened wrapping paper on Christmas morning. Seven cats rolling around and pouncing on rustling paper never gets old :-)
[Moozik: Pulp - Joyriders]
No real surprise that a lot more information has been gathered than was initially disclosed by the Bush administration.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.
Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.
What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.
[Moozik: Killing Joke - Eighties]
Dear Linens 'n Things,
No you may not have my phone number. No it will not help you provide additional 'service' to me. Posting a little 'may we have your phone number' sticker by the cash registers will not make me decide it's ok to give you my phone number. I have cash in hand, I'm going to pay for my items, and I never ever want to hear from you again. Do not call me, do not send me useless shite in the mail.
Thanks and a Merry Christmas.
Kevin Spencer
[Moozik: Orgy - Stitches]
Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.
Already there are plans to extend the database by increasing the storage period to five years and by linking thousands of additional cameras so that details of up to 100 million number plates can be fed each day into the central databank.
[Moozik: Gary Numan - Telekon]
Tonight we decided it would be a bloody great idea to do some last minute shopping. Along with the rest of the population of Phoenix it would seem. Why does everyone turn into a complete nutjob before Christmas eh?
Well It would seem the iPod Nanos are quite popular. I overheard a bloke in Best Buy asking for one and was told they were sold out. He said that he'd been to 14 shops in the last 3 days and they were sold out everywhere. Why he didn't ring the shop beforehand instead of driving across the state on the offchance is a mystery to me :-)
Overheard while waiting to pay at one shop, "Derek, don't waste your money on stupid crap.". Seemed like perfectly good advice to give to a child. Except it wasn't a child, it was a 60 (ish) year old bloke. Which made it more amusing really :-)
[Moozik: Seize - Too Good To Be True]
Oh yes, those tax dollars hard at work I see. Clearly, congresswoman Jo Ann Davis should be applauded for taking the time to work on the important issues facing the nation. Ahem.
Congresswoman Jo Ann Davis today introduced H. Res. 579, a resolution expressing the sense of Congress that the symbols and traditions of Christmas should be protected, and that references to Christmas should be supported. This measure, which is non-binding and does not carry the force of law, simply states Congressional support for traditional references to Christmas that are being eradicated from the public dialogue."There has been an ongoing effort by retailers and many media outlets to slowly eradicate references to Christmas and the symbols and traditions that come along with it from public dialogue," said Congresswoman Jo Ann Davis. "Common sense has been hijacked by political correctness, and the Christmas Season has become a vague, generic ‘holiday season’ spanning from Thanksgiving to New Year's Day, representing nothing and celebrating anything. December 25th is the federally recognized day known as Christmas, but retail chains across the country have banned their employees from wishing people a Merry Christmas. As if it could not get more ridiculous, the Christmas tree has now become a holiday tree. This is political correctness run amok. No one should feel like they have done something wrong for wishing someone a Merry Christmas," added Davis.
[Moozik: Skinny Puppy - The Choke]
Snooping without judicial oversight. Nice.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.
The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.
[Moozik: Meat Beat Manifesto - Euthanasia]
By accident, I happened to sort my iTunes library by song title. What is it with the last year of the decade as songtitles anyway?
1959 - The Sisters Of Mercy
1969 - The Sisters Of Mercy
1979 - The Smashing Pumpkins
1999 - Prince And The Revolution
Hmm, I seem to be missing the 1989 installment.
[Moozik: Public Image Ltd. - Seattle]
Yesterday I took one of my four use-it-or-lose-it vacation days that I have left for this year. After some rather excellent chinese for lunch, we caught the 3:00pm showing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. An excellent time to go and see it. It's been out for weeks and everyone and their brother was queuing up to see The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. This meant that our theatre was completely deserted. NICE.
I really enjoyed the movie. The book is rather large and Mike Newell did an excellent job of squeezing everything in. I particularly liked Miranda Richardson as Rita Skeeter and I had Queenie flashbacks from the second season of Blackadder :-)
Going forward it will be really interesting to see what they do about the obvious problem of the main actors looking far older than the characters they are portraying. For example, the 17 year old Rupert Grint is supposed to be 14 in the Goblet of Fire. A three year difference at that age really shows.
But then, any other actors just wouldn't be the same would they?
[Moozik: Kraftwerk - Trans Europe Express]
It's not often you get to have a Perl first. Today I had one. I had a subroutine that needed to return a list of filenames sorted by their inode-last-modified timestamp. It's funny that I've been writing Perl code for over 5 years and never needed to use a Schwartzian Transform until today.
return
map { $_->[0] }
sort { $a->[1] <=> $b->[1] }
map { [$_, -M] }
keys %list;
[Moozik: Tubeway Army - We Are So Fragile]
I know, I know, reading Slashdot comments can lead to madness but occasionally you read something that makes it worthwhile. So today while reading some comments on the Google Fixes IE Bug story, the following gem almost made me spit the coffee over my laptop keyboard.
The incident does raise important questions about Google as a desktop software vendor and its plans for rolling out future security fixes, said MacDonald.I question Mr. MacDonald's credibility. If this is the same gentleman I'm thinking of, he's an older man who has a farm...or at least had one.
[Moozik: Peter Gabriel - I Have The Touch]
Out of curiosity, I wondered which songs were the ones I listened to the most. Well, according to my iTunes playcounts, I appear to be obsessed with the following ten songs (playcount - artist - song):
51 - Depeche Mode - Precious
33 - Depeche Mode - A Pain That I'm Used To
31 - Moby - My Weakness
30 - Madonna - Hung Up
28 - The Cure - Push
26 - Coldplay - Square One
25 - Depeche Mode - Stripped
22 - The Bravery - Tyrant
20 - Gorillaz - Kids With Guns
Woah, how did Madonna get in the top five? That sound you hear is any street cred I had left smashing to pieces on the floor.
[Moozik: More Machine Than Man - Why]
Why oh why would you ever send a bill to a customer for $1.38? Eh? This isn't a one time expense, I use your service every month (ahem, obviously not very much) so wouldn't it be far more cost efficient to wait until I owed >= $2.00 or $3.00? Or at the very least, have some logic in your software so that you only send out a bill for a ridiculous amount after 3 months with a running balance < $2.00.
[Moozik: Skinny Puppy - Far Too Frail]
Time will tell if I find this useful. But today at least, I think the foXpose Firefox extension is quite luuurvely. Click on a button in the status bar and you can view all your open tabs in one single browser window. NICE.
[Moozik: Murder Inc - Last Of The Urgents]
At yesterday's press conference with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and JCS Chief General Peter Pace. (emphasis mine)
PACE: It is absolutely responsibility of every U.S. service member if they see inhumane treatment being conducted, to intervene, to stop it. . . .Good to see General Pace give Rummy a public slapping though.RUMSFELD: I don't think you mean they have an obligation to physically stop it, it's to report it.
PACE: If they are physically present when inhumane treatment is taking place, sir, they have an obligation to try to stop it.