Exceive

You know those pictures at the top, with the word Exceive on them, that change every time you look at the page?

Those are now all my own pictures. Making real wide pictures out of my more normal aspect pictures is kind of difficult.

Previously, on whatever the heck this is…

There was a Presidential press conference. A reporter nobody recognized asked a kiss-ass question. So what else is new?

Well, it turns out that this guy is under a pseudonym, which is a major protocol/security violation. But what the heck. Next, it turns out his entire journalist training consists of a two-day seminar on how to be a conservative reporter. And his journalist career consists of a very small number of news stories on a conservative “news” web site. So basically, he’s a fake journalist that somebody in the White House has been giving day-passes to so he can ask the questions the President wants to answer if the real journalists are asking him too many hard questions.

But wait, there’s more…

This guy owns a bunch of web domain names and possibly sites for guys who like to play soldier in bed. And he’s posted nude pictures of himself, and a price list for his services. It would appear that this guy’s real job is that he’s a prostitute specializing in fantasies about military men. Not women’s fantasies, either. So it appears that someone in the White House went out of his way (bypassing background checking) to bring in a gay hooker. Bush promised to bring dignity into the White House. Some people have a bit of cognitive dissonance here, but I don’t: gay hookers are closer to dignity than what’s happening in Iraq is to making Americans safer, or Iraq a democracy, or whatever the reason for the war is this week.

This story was broken by bloggers. Repeatedly, as it became more and more absurd.

Anyway, the National Press Club is doing a show about about bloggers and journalists. They have invited some journalists, a blogger, and this guy. The letter at the link explains NPC thing pretty well. I don’t share the sense of outrage at the inclusion of the guy - I think he’s there as a freak to gawk at, not to represent bloggers or journalists. I could be wrong about that. But the panel has a very serious lack of balance. Read the letter.

The administrator in question had miscalculated. The leader of that group, which was not an insurgency in any normal sense of the term, lacked the proper courtesy and respect for authority to remain dead.

The group went on to take over the homeland of the occupying forces, and then some. Unfortunately, a good many of that group’s members forget the gentleness, mercy, and humility that the leader both taught and lived, and act as if He were the warlord the administrator was afraid He was. They forget the lesson of His victory over death and empire.

500 miles west of Baghdad, the leader of a suspected insurgent group was executed by the occupation administrative executive.

Susie Madrak at Suburban Guerrilla posted a link linking to a link about her link.

So obviously I have to trackback to it.

Oh, yeah - when you get through all the links you end up at a pretty good article on credentialism and class.

I got this job description. Not exactly in my field, but I thought the range of tool skill they considered helpful was a bit wide.

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1+ years manufacturing machining experience preferred plus basic mechanical aptitude and attention to detail to learn setups and protect quality. Great advancement, work team and outstanding benefits for full time. Forklift or micrometer helpful. $11-15 starting with regular advancement to $18+.

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For those unfamiliar with the tool, a micrometer is a measuring device for extremely (as in not visible to the human eye) small sizes. Not actually unusual in machine work - the things being made often have to be made to extremely tight specifications. Still, a bit of a contrast to the forklift.

A spam that I’v received quite a few copies of recently:

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95% of home computers are infected with spyware, is your computer one of them?

Spyware can:

• Monitor your personal info (Chat Logs, Passwords, Emails, SSN)
• Dramatically Slow Down your computer, until it crashes
• Flood you with aggressive Pop-ups and Commercials
• Hide on your PC un-revealed by Anti-Virus or Firewall Programs
• Sometimes even result in Credit Card Fraud or Identity Theft!

Click here to get Spy-Control and scan your computer for free.

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All true.
But don’t ever download software from spam. Ever. OK, if you are a computer security researcher and have the right tools, then go ahead. If you aren’t a pro, don’t do it.
The link (not shown) is to a domain “*.free*spyware.com” (the * represents something that I prefer not to reveal, because I don’t want to send anybody that way) which is almost certainly an honest description of the product.
It is very likely that the messages I got were sent (withou their knowledge or consent) by people who clicked the link.

A lot of people think “hey, I don’t have anything worth hacking on my computer” but these days, what the bad guys want is to use your computer to attack other computers. Precautions you take protect not just you, but the online community.

There are several good (and quite a few bad) tools out there to protect your system. For spyware, I use AdAware and SpyBot Search and Destroy, both of which have entirely usable free versions. Use a search engine to find these tools. I’m not including the links because at this point I hope you are feeling kind of paranoid.

Why are links and downloadable files in web sites OK and in email not? Because web sites are traceable and don’t spread. If a link on a web site turns out to be toxic, you (or a law enforcement professional) probably track down the person or entity responsible. And the site can be shut down. With email, there usualy no good way to be sure who is responsible - even if you tnow what machine it came from, in many cases that machine has been hijacked. And spam email just keeps coming…

There are two major exceptions to web links being reasonably safe:
1) Spyware. The trick is that in most cases it isn’t illegal. You download a supposedly free program, click “I Accept the long boring license agreement I didn’t read” and bang: you’ve essentially sold your computer to the bad guys for the price of a crappy little program. Don’t do that. Do a quick search (google, for example) on the program or the company that sells it - read comments people have made about it. And don’t click “I accept” unless you have a pretty good reason to think it is OK - you’ve read and understood the agreement, and/or you trust the company.
2) Spoof pages. You get to these mostly by clicking links in spam. They look like your bank’s page, or eBay, or something else legitimate. Type in your password, and you’ve just cloned yourself. Except that your clone only makes withdrawals, never deposits. The link looked like eBay, but when you got there, the URL in that box at the top of your browser (which you probably didn’t read) said something odd. That’s why you don’t click links in email, you get to the page some other way - type it in the URL box, use the bookmark you made, look them up on Google.

SITO is an art site. It hosts art in a big way (693 artists, 13399 works a few minutes ago) and provides some neat collaborative art opportunities. There is a rather low-volume set of discussion forums - each artwork has an area for people to discuss it. Pretty much anybody (I don’t know of any limitations, but when I signed up it was a manual process on their end, and I suspect that if you don’t play nice they won’t let you play) can get a user ID and post artworks. Surprisingly, most of the art is very good.

They recently had a hard drive on the server go bad, and I had to go without SITO for several days. When they got it back up, I looked around at what I have posted there.

I have a work here dated 1995.

Ten Freakin’ Years!

I’ve wandered in and out - there was one time I realized I had been away for two years.

That means that Ed and Jon have been doing this for more than a decade - I don’t know how long they had been doing it when I first dropped by - and they didn’t take big time off.

Not only is that just an impressive amount of work and dedication, it’s pretty amazing the way this site stays fresh and fun, and still celebrates the new connectedness that the ‘net brings.

Erik and I were wondering about this flag we saw:

Turns out the story is about some Marines that were called up to intercept a ship full of gunpowder. They had a drum with the snake and “Don’t Tread on me” painted on it, so “An American Guesser”, who was probably Ben Franklin, “guessed” that the rattlesnake was the national symbol, and explained why.

The original picture apparently showed a snake with 13 1/2 rattles, the 1/2 representing Canada, sort of foreshadowing the boring Monroe Doctrine. That’s the one that says this (in general) continent is no longer available for colonization and in particular, Spain, Portugal, drop it - neither of you get jack round these parts anymore.

I like the snake better than the eagle, personally. Eagles are so Roman Empire.

One thing the Guesser didn’t mention, but is true nevertheless: a rattlesnake doesn’t, having bitten what stepped on it, go back to bite somebody else who looks kind of like the first person. A real American Rattlesnake would be finishing the job in Afghanistan and perhaps Saudi Arabia, not trying to gift-wrap venom in Iraq.

Alex is hiding out - but he is easier to see than he thinks he is. Almost three year olds are like that.