October 2004 Entries
IBM just had one of those "the hackers are out there" tv ads. I remember reading somewhere that some government agency reported some astronomical number of hack attempts per day. I bet you a steak dinner they include these: #Software: Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0GET /scripts/root.exe /c+dir 80 - 66.65.167.224 - 404 0 64GET /MSADC/root.exe /c+dir 80 - 66.65.167.224 - 404 0 64GET /c/winnt/system32/cmd.exe /c+dir 80 - 66.65.167.224 - 404 0 64GET /d/winnt/system32/cmd.exe /c+dir 80 - 66.65.167.224 - 404 0 64GET /scripts/..%5c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe /c+dir 80 - 66.65.167.224 - 404 0 64GET /_vti_bin/..%5c../..%5c../..%5c../winnt/system32/cmd.exe /c+dir 80 - 66.65.167.224 - 404 0 64GET /scripts/winnt/system32/cmd.exe...
I'm just now watching last night's Saturday Night Live. Eminem is performing. And it happened again! Caught with the mic around his waist when the track clearly has Em's voice going. Also I watched it carefully and while you can clearly tell he is working hard to read the lyrics off the teleprompter, I'm ok with that because it is a very long song, but he is way off the pre-recorded track at many points throughout the song. I suppose it is one of those things that "all the artists do" and they are afraid to sound real which for...
About eight years ago my college friend Colleen asked to speak to me, took me out to a public park and proceeded to tell me what I needed to hear. She laid out a clear case for me being a jackass. It was an extremely caring and loving thing to do. I remember retorting just a couple of points, but overall of course she was right and I knew it. I like to think I'm a better person today for it. Thank you. Now I think it is time again. Maybe it is the constant barrage of reality fix me up...
Congratulations to my little brother Kevin and his wife Julia on the birth of their first child.
I am decreeing this the official turning point. E! Online has added RSS Feeds.ChannelsLatest NewsMovie NewsCelebrity NewsTV NewsMusic NewsPS. I use Newsgator.
This is the most deeply personal blog posting I've encountered.
A Difficult Year and a Difficult Blog Entry to Write...
It has been a very difficult year for me at home and I have been postponing and procrastinating writing this blog entry. Yet, I have had a hard time conceiving of adding to my blog until this is written.
[link to the rest] Pat Helland
From Gizmodo.It's an idea so obvious that it's probably been around for years and I've just missed it. Dremel, makers of the "Tool Most Likely To Destroy Something That Was Working Fine Already," is selling a translucent orange pumpkin carving kit, with templates and tools to carve your own intricate designs. It looks like it's available at Lowes and other hardware stores, although you can try to order online if you want (it's a little late now, isn't it?)If you can find them, they look to be about $20 for the whole kit.Product Page [Dremel]
From ReallySmallTalk and Dan Kennedy. BUH BYE, MILLI VANASHLEE. HELLO, KERRY. At first, Ashlee Simpson's lip-synch gaffe on Saturday Night Live this weekend made me cynical. I thought of all the forty and fifty year-old men handling this poor girl's career and almost certainly not trusting her to sing on live TV. The suits that pressure a girl into not singing her own (Okay, her writer-producer's own) songs. In March of this year, I finished sitting through eighteen months of marketing meetings as part of my job at a major record label and I learned just how much of that kind...
You can buy extremely real looking plastic BB pistols in toy stores there. We went go-karting in Macau. They went all out in the bathroom. This is a picture of the sink. The shifter lever on the right turns the water on. There's also a race-car urinal pic if you are really interested. Our hosts took us to the horse track. I didn't win a damn thing, but I had an excellent time. My boss's father was a horse trainer and he grew up around horses - he picked the winner 3-of-4 times. They had an F1 car at the airport....
Weekend recap: Went to a wedding in Massachusetts. The priest brought up the Red Sox no fewer than three different times. I got to watch game one of the Red Sox world series in a local bar in Springfield Mass. An extremely unfortunate combination of jet-lag and alcohol = waking up at 6am completely hung over and not being able to properly sleep it off. bummer.
Yankees-Sox games 4,5,6 were all "watched" online play-by-play. On the morning of game 7 (Hong Kong = 12 hr time difference) I was fortunate to have timed my flight home that afternoon so I packed and watched from my hotel. At first I found the game on a Japanese station and that meant only one thing. Matsui. When the ball was not in play the camera man only had one job. What is Matsui up to? Matsui in the dugout. Matsui warming up in the outfield. Matsui picking his nose. I flipped around and managed to find the ESPN-international channel...
When I arrived at the Cathay Pacific checkin counter in Hong Kong, they informed me that they had overbooked the flight and I was assigned a coach seat for the 20 hour trip to New York. They slid a calculator across the table with a cash offer in HK dollars for my inconvenience. The number worked out to around US$1750. My first reaction was "I don't care about the money, my company paid for the ticket, do what you can to get me a business class seat." So I head off to the lounge and it hits me - that...
From Slate.Which raises the obvious question: Could Kerry win the presidency but lose the popular vote? At Daily Kos, political scientist Tom Schaller says it's unlikely but possible, particularly because Kerry is underperforming Gore's numbers in blue states, including Massachusetts and New Jersey. If that's not far-fetched enough for you, here's a scenario I discovered while playing with the Los Angeles Times' electoral map: Bush wins Ohio, Florida, and Colorado. Kerry sweeps the rest of the battleground: Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The result: a 269-269 tie. Democrats cry that Bush gets "selected" again, this...
(Laughter.) The senator now says we'd have to pass some international truth standard. The truth is we should never turn America's national security decisions over to international bodies or leaders of other countries. (Applause.) -DubyaIn an article about this Bush quote William Saletan in Slate closes with this paragraph: I know I've been hard on the president lately. I'd like to say something nice about him. I'd like to be "fair and balanced." But my first responsibility as a reporter is to the truth. When one candidate tells half the truth, and the other says the truth doesn't matter, it becomes...
I'm surprised Americans didn't invent this phenomenon.
Many of the hotels in Hong Kong have artificially inflated floor numbering.
I am currently saying on the "18th" floor. In reality it is the 9th floor. The lobby is on "7". etc. I guess somebody figured out that people associate low floor numbers with lower quality motels and such and that they could increase the customer's perceived elite status by ratcheting up the numbering system.
From Mike Doughty's* new blog. Pollster John Zogby, in this week's New Yorker:"Before the election in 2000, I called my call center in Utica and said, 'Put this in the poll: You live in the land of Oz, and the candidates are the Tin Man, who's all brains and no heart, and the Scarecrow, who's all heart and no brains. Who would you vote for?' The next day, I called Utica said, 'Whaddaya got?' They said, 'Well, we've got Gore--,' I said, 'I don't care about Gore. What's Oz?' It was 46.2 for the Tin Man and 46.2 for the...
One of the things that stikes me about this trip is the difficult opportunity costs I'm paying to be here.
My nieces' birthday party.
This is my favorite time of year in New England.
My friend Brian is having a party. And he has a roof deck and lives down the block.
Yankees - Red Sox baseball (go Sox!)
NFL football.
And the unknown other things that are going on back home.
I'm not complaining specifically, just bemoaning the idea of giving up stuff and not being able to be in two places at once.
I'm on the plane in one of those seats where the flight attendant sits directly facing you while you takeoff. The guy next to me is an uber-frequent-flyer and knows the woman. She knows the names of his kids, etc. They get to talking about how they had to kick sixty people off the plane. (Coach-class natch)Why you ask? Well because due to unusually heavy jet stream headwinds our flight plan is 14 hours and we needed to make more room for jet fuel and less people or else we don't make it all the way to Tokyo (the stopover)....
Yes friends. I'm headed back to Hong Kong.
Here's the scene - Leon and joe Buck are doing an interview."Leon always stands on the left to showcase my good side" ... "You see that dimple, that's my trademark dimple" ... "This is my good side too" etc"I hate to be the one that tells you this, but if that ?shit? gets out you may want to stick to radio"It sounds like he says "shit". I've played this over and over on my tivo and I can't figure out what word fits there other than shit. It would make sense if he said "if that should get out", but...
Retro tech Sunday.
Available on eBay. [link]
The guy from the Spin Doctors. (Chris Barron) Seen twice now. You can tell it was him because a) he was with a woman way hotter than a guy that looks like this would normally score b) he was wearing a silk ascot/scarf thing.
Comedian Judy Gold. She lives directly across from my building.
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I couldn't take it anymore. I broke down. I bought an iPod.It doesn't do all the stuff I want, and doesn't support all the formats I want and there are better ones coming out "just around the corner", and I really don't like giving money to Apple, but it doesn't matter anymore cause I own it.
I almost posted this a while back, but it seems to be gaining some degree of respectability so here goes.. Is Bush Wired?This site is a clearinghouse for discussion of whether President Bush uses an earpiece through which he's fed lines and cues by offstage advisers.The post where I discovered this idea was talking about the presidential debate when Bush said something like "now, let me finish" when nobody had interrupted him, no lights had gone one, etc. Now the geek set is aflutter with the idea of tapping into the communication link and making bush say ridiculous things. It...
Need to say more with less in an IM conversation?
http://ilovemessenger.msn.com
Expect me to be using these often.
I watched this one also. The most striking thing about it to me was how much Cheney reinforced the quote (snl) about Bush "the man cannot speak."
My favorite moment was the same-sex marriage constitutional amendment bit and Edwards complete disarmament of Cheney talking about his family. I wonder what the poll results would have been immediately before that section. The whole dynamic changed.
Seth Godin points to HELLO, my name is Scott. Basically, this guy Scott has been wearing a nametag every single day for 1434 days (as of today).He says that it has fundamentally changed his life. As well as parlaying the whole thing into speaking engagements, books and tapes about how to create "front porches" in your life and work. It is interesting because I have a bad reputation for being the opposite of Scott. I tend not to introduce myself unnecessarily and have been known to present an air of relative un-welcomeness to other people around the office. This week...
Go Fug Yourself - devoted to "fugly" pictures of celebrities followed by some caustic text. What girl doesn't dream of a marrying a David Silver lookalike who actually purchases -- and wears! In public! -- a trucker cap that reads "Rock Out With Your Cock Out"?I think I speak for all of humanity when I beg you, Kevin, to put the cock away. Yes, that's Mr. Britney Spears.
I was able to overcome my paralyzing fondo* to watch the debates. Fortunately other online votes agree with me for once. * fondo is a term my friend Girisha coined to mean "that extreme un-comfort while watching awkward moments, particularly on TV"