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2003.03.12 @ 03:50 AM CST More notes on SXSW fun... As of this evening, SXSW Interactive is over and SXSW Music begins. I only paid for Interactive, so I'm done with "SouthBy" events for this year. I had a good time and met some fun/cool people. On Sunday, I went to a panel called "How to Counter-Attack a Spammer," which I found to be an interesting title since that's essentially not possible. I went mostly to see what they had to say and what kinds of questions people asked. The panelists started with and explanation of some of the spam filtering packages they are using and have used in the past. They started fielding questions pretty quickly; one of which was that people wanted to know how to get spammers back. There is quite a bit of animosity over the deluge of spam that most people get. The short answer is that you can't get them back. The long answer is that you can try to track spammers down via tools such as whois and traceroute and some sleuthing, but that you may just find bogus data or end up complaining to people who don't care. If they do care, you might get a spammer's connectivity terminated, but that usually just results in them moving. *sigh* Later on Sunday was a keynote by Lawrence Lessig regarding "intellectual property" and copyright law in the United States and more generally in culture. He said that he should have the talk and/or the slides from it online (under one of the Creative Commons licenses) sometime in the near future. On Monday I attended a keynote by Joshua Davis where I became convinced that Macromedia (aka Adobe) Flash does have some real uses. This is similar to when I found that Java does have some real use for the general public (as a ssh application embedded in a web page). Davis' uses for Flash could be described as art derived from code and entropy. Check out his website. Though I don't have the Flash plugin installed on my laptop (which I'm currently using) to verify, I think he has samples available there. Following that keynote I attended a couple more panels, one of which was moderated by LinearB (one of the two people behind GeekAustin). It was a discussion about the current state of the online adult industry. After my previous job I was aware in a subconscious way of much of what was discussed by the panelists, though I think many of the attendees got some good information. That evening was the LiveJournal / Adult Webmaster party at Elysium. While there I met brad, thedward, and wesf, as well as saw arya, fnord, linearb, taral, and denshi. Today I made it to part of Bruce Sterling's panel called Tomorrow Now, Nuclear Tacos, and then to Bruce Sterling's party. I ended up being designated driver for a couple of friends and got to meet even more people while there. From there I took people home and then headed to Mojo's to hang out. I'm not yet sure (at around 6:00am) when I'll go to sleep. And now I'm off to research which of Covad, Constant Communications (aka Nabi), Speakeasy.net, CoreNAP (the founders of the former Jump.net), and SBC Southwestern Bell I'll end up using to replace my now assuredly doomed Jump.net (aka Hosting.com) DSL. Whee... *sigh*
2003.03.08 @ 04:55 PM CST Being a good geek, I've been watching to see what hardware, operating systems, and so forth people are using at SXSW Interactive. I've seen a whole lot of people using Apple PowerBooks. Most are running Mac OS X. I'd guess that half or nearly half of the visible laptops are Macinti. I've also noticed that many of the people using Windows machines to take notes are using Notepad. Yes, simple, tiny, free, bundled notepad.exe. They're not taking notes in Word or some other overkill piece of software. I just found that fact amusing. :-) Damn... Now I need a PowerBook of some model. I'm thinking an iBook 12" or a PowerBook 12" or 15". And I'm currently listening to a panel with Cory Doctorow who is talking a bit about the EFF. It continues to amuse me when I hear about the event that helped create the EFF; that is the raid by the FBI on Steve Jackson Games here in Austin. I'm happy that they survived and that Illuminati Online has too. Cory also made a comment where he quoted Orwell, reminding us that Orwell found hope in the proles. Cory's version is that he finds hope in the trolls, i.e. the trolls on Slashdot, et.al. He was saying that his hope for political change influenced by the online world was to enable the voices of the trolls to be heard in a numerous enough way to make a difference.
2003.03.04 @ 04:55 AM CST Since I'm still without a job (though I am checking the want ads nearly daily and letting people know that I am without work), I have really odd sleeping / waking hours. As such, I'm at Mojo's right now. Recently, I finally got around to scanning a few of the pictures I took while I was in Big Bend over the winter holidays. I've included scaled versions of several of them below (each is a link to the full image).
The above were taken with my mom's Nikon camera (I don't remember the model number, but it is similar to an N6006) with 400 speed film and manual focus and exposure. In other news, I found that I know six or seven (I've not been able to remember who the seventh is) people who have March 01st as their birthday. I made it to birthday stuff for two of them, one of whom I end up seeing about once a year, guess what, around March 01st. :-) And now for the usual linkage... First off I have what are hopefully the last two John Taylor Gatto URLs that I'll "bore you with." They are an interview transcript and The Six-Lesson School Teacher. Also, I have an article from the Austin Chronicle about some distressing events that small, local, Austin businesses are facing. The only suggestions I have are to be careful about where you spend your money and hope. I know I'm generally more happy with places like Mojo's, I Love Video, Waterloo Records, and the like than I am with their larger competitors which are usually chains. Finally, yesterday (though I've not slept yet) I went to see Richard M. Stallman (a.k.a. RMS) speak at UT. I know many people consider him to be a raving lunatic or way off the mark, but I think that if you actually listen to him and give him a chance, you might not be so quick to disagree with him. I'd advise you to remember that the world needs optimistic people just as I remind myself (or try to) that the world needs realistic and pessimistic people too. :-) For those of you who don't know or don't remember, RMS is the man who started the GNU project and founded the Free Software Foundation. If you're curious as to why he did so or what the organizations stand for, you can read articles stored on their web server.
2003.02.12 @ 04:07 PM CST First off, I have a couple of links for you. The first is a transcript from "The O'Reilly Factor" featuring Jeremy Glick. The second is the One Question Geek Test. The third is the UserFriendly strip from this past Saturday. In other news, I've noticed that I'm not randomly thinking of my ex very often, which is unlike what happened before we dated, the time during which we were dating, and a bit after. Since the conscious me has been okay with things for a while now I guess this just means I'm ready for my subconscious to be okay with things so I can really move on. Guh. *sigh*
2003.02.10 @ 07:45 AM CST A friend saw my earlier entry mentioning John Taylor Gatto and suggested I read this article from the must read articles page of the Arizona Families for Home Education website. After reading it, I think it is a good summary for those who don't really want to read the whole book I referenced earlier. I don't think it was intended as a summary of said book, but it can function that way.
2003.02.06 @ 06:02 AM CST I was just sitting here at the computer about to go to sleep for a bit when I realized that it was raining. I knew we'd been having wet weather, but there hadn't been enough rain for me to hear it inside until just a few minutes ago. After standing outside in the pre-dawn relative darkness for about ten minutes just now, I wonder how one goes about reconciling the desire to live in a city, especially the desire to live in a city with decent density and decent mass / public transportation with the desire to have a nearby place that is naturally quite dark and quiet. Ideas anyone? I have in my lifetime experienced at least one city with wonderful mass transit, at least when compared to most cities in the United States. That city is Tokyo; a massive, dense, and relatively clean city. It, being a city, does have its share of light and noise. I grew up with and still have access to the ranch where my mother was raised. It gets very nicely dark and quiet there. The nearest settlements are Kerrville, Harper, and Fredericksburg. That puts it about two hours drive from my current city of choice, Austin. I think I need some place much closer. When I lived on campus at UT, I would occasionally take post 11pm walks around campus, especially after a rain storm. It being campus made it a bit quieter than other places might be, though not darker. I guess I have a need for a place where nature is relatively unhindered to go and be / think / recharge / what-have-you. Current music: The sound of rain falling
2003.01.25 @ 04:25 PM CST So last night I was at a local coffee shop called FlightPath with some friends. We were all there with laptops to have caffeine and take advantage of the free wireless access and hang out. I'd been using my home systems before I left and knew that my aDSL line was working when I left. And I'd logged in to my home firewall machine while I was there. Then my connection lagged or dropped (I don't remember which now). I tried connecting from several other places and wasn't successful. The group I was with then went to have food, so I decided to worry more about it when I got home. So I get home and use the laptop to get online with my dialup account and start real-time monitoring to see if/when things improve. I also called Hosting.com (aka Jump.net) to see what they could tell me. They said that it looked like one of the switches had died and that they didn't have an ETA for things to be up again. While I'd been doing that I got on irc (of course) and a friend pointed me to these graphs which were quite surprising. The information he was able to retrieve suggested that a new worm had been released and was attacking Microsoft SQL servers. This afternoon when I got up and read Slashdot I read through the comments in their story about the worm and found a comment mentioning that the worm had crashed several Cisco routers at various locations around the Internet. Apparently the traffic levels can trigger a bug in Cisco's NetFlow traffic monitoring code. I know that Hosting.com has at least some Cisco gear and that they monitor the traffic to/from each aDSL line they serve, so that could be why my Internet connection died last night at right about the same time that the aforementioned graphs start to look ugly. :-) Whee... Such fun... Why do we still have such problems with things like MS SQL and Cisco NetFlow? Though not completely related, this bit of a larger article should, in my opinion, be read and understood by more people. Note that even if my aDSL connection hadn't died completely, several of the major US backbone Internet providers were having enough problems that reaching some parts of the Internet was impossible, so I'm not just bitching about my connectivity having gone down. Once my aDSL line was back up, I still wasn't able to work on the book I've been reading online.
2003.01.25 @ 05:00 AM CST While reading the comments in the Plastic article I mentioned in my previous entry, I ran across a reference to this page which contains the text of an editorial sent by a teacher from New York state to The Wall Street Journal during the year when said teacher was New York State Teacher of the Year. I found that editorial interesting and wondered what else this teacher had to say, so I started reading the rest of the book which is available online. With the odd sleeping/waking schedule I've had for the past while I've only made it through the prologue and the first chapter at this point. As such, I don't think I'm far enough along to fully know/understand the author's premise much less know if I agree or not. Either way, I think there is much good content about which to think on one's own. In one of my LiveJournal reading stints, I ran across this link to an interesting timeline concerning events surrounding September 11th, 2001. I expect the information listed in this timeline is difficult to verify considering it is essentially a conspiracy theory, but it does make one re-think the potential motives of the US and other governments in the world.
2003.01.19 @ 09:30 PM CST A friend gave me the URL for this t-shirt earlier. I found it quite amusing and may have to get one, though there are quite a few places where wearing it would be inappropriate. :-) Despite that, the $17 price doesn't seem too bad. Of course, then I need to get a few from ThinkGeek as well. In other news, I am getting more annoyed at the current President of the United States. I very much don't agree that we have a good reason to go to war with Iraq, or really did with Afghanistan (oh... wait... that wasn't a "war"). We have a problem with the apparent recent actions taken by North Korea toward Nuclear weapons, yet we haven't threatened military action against them. So what gives? Apparently we just want to fuck with the politics in the major oil supplying countries again. And yes, I know there is more to it than that. Terrorism is part of it. But the cycle of violence has to stop somewhere. We've been nasty to the world for too long. And despite the fact that we do need to be able to defend ourselves, we don't have to be bastards to the rest of the planet at the same time. :-) And while I have you in thinking mode, go read this play. It was recently discussed here if you're interested in that sort of thing. :-) The play can be downloaded from the author's web site for free as a PDF and is a pretty quick read. Current music: Sarah McLachlan - Fear (Hybrid's Super Collider Mix)
2003.01.14 @ 09:04 AM CST So I've actually been doing stuff on my machines at home again these past couple of days. It has been a while since I felt like doing some of this stuff, so this is good; though I don't usually feel like more than a few hours (or one small project) at a time. Oh well, progress is progress. :-) I finally got a BIOS update to install on my dual Pentium II Overdrive motherboard. That was interesting because while the board appeared to just be an Intel PR440FX board, it is really the Toshiba OEM version of the board. I'd figured it was the Toshiba OEM board before, but had zero luck finding information on Toshiba's site about it. Google Groups saved the day with the news that the BIOS Recovery procedure as documented by Intel and people in the intel.motherboards.pentium_pro Usenet group would work. Google was helpful again when it came time to find out if the matched ancient ISA Ethernet cards I have were indeed NE2000 clones and whether or not they were PNP only or PNP and softset style cards. I quickly found the driver(s) and softset utility for them and found that they are NE2000 clones. As a result they're perfect for use in my dad's old 486DX/33 which is becoming a firewall for when he gets RoadRunner. (BTW, disk access on an ISA only system with an old IDE controller is really slow; to the point where dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda on a 3.0GB hard drive took more than an hour.) In my nearly daily job board scanning I've run across two tech support jobs that I have the skill set to do... One is server tech support for Dell and the other is tech support at Apple (though I don't know which subset of Apple products). I keep going back and forth on whether or not I'd be interested in applying for one or both. At this point, I'd rather not drive from just south of the river in Austin to Dell (in Round Rock). If I were to apply for / get the Dell job I would have to go get my RHCE (RedHat Certified Engineer) for which I should just have to play with RedHat 8.x for a couple of hours and then go take. For the Apple job I'd like to know Mac OS X better. Part of that will come from working there, and the other part would come from the iBook or 15" PowerBook G4 that I'd like to buy to give myself a faster laptop and more experience. :-) (Such a fun way to justify that purchase, no?) However, the questions remain... Do I want to do phone tech support? And if so, can I stand to do so for a while?
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