BunkBlog

The ever-vigilant information systems security officer has just announced that there are email greeting cards that install porn on your computer. Thanks for that timely information. Spent a couple weeks hiding under a rock, have you?

Defense Information Systems Agency, the most messed-up group of IT folks I’ve had the misfortune of dealing with. Our MS Office binaries are stored on a file server, so they are slow and crash-prone. The official browser for DISA is Netscape Navigator 4.7. The IT shop won’t support laptops or PDAs, regardless of how many are purchased by the various departments. Ostriches.
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Toyota plans to have no pure-gasoline autos by 2012

I’m waiting to see the MR2 hybrid. Then I wouldn’t have to feel guilty about wanting a sporty car while also wanting to be ecologically and economically thoughtful. 40 mpg sports car? Oh, yeah!

Toyota sold nearly 37,000 hybrid cars last year, out of nearly 6 million total sales. And they expect to transition to all-hybrid by 2012? Neat trick. Apparently hybrid cars cost $3000 more to produce than a comparable pure-gasoline driven auto.
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For anyone who has been stationed at the Third Military Intelligence Battalion, check out my newest design.

Go on, , you know you want something to remember ARL by.
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Argh! Cafepress has changed their terms of service. Although it makes no difference to anything involved in the store itself, there is one new feature that worries me – if I don’t make $25 in commission in 6 months, they can close my account. I’m a little concerned, since I’ve made $28 in commission in 12 months (the age of the stores).

Anyone have any ideas for new designs? Surprisingly, nobody has bought an Eat Me thong yet.

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Although your coworker’s mediocrity may annoy you, it makes your merely good efforts look outstanding.
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Although I decried the rise of consumerism recently, I’d like to request that someone get me the Sony Clie NX60 for Christmas. If I had that, I’d be the happiest little boy in the world. They just released it today, and my old Palm III is pathetic and sad. Seriously, I’m gonna replace the Palm if I don’t get a new one for the holidays. This thing is dying. Random freezes, data loss from unavoidable hard reboots… Besides, the Clie is sweeeeet!
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This is a great article on the growing disparity between the very rich and the more plebeian masses.

Pretty good reading, if a bit long.
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From the files of “the headline sounds more interesting than the story” –

Firefighter in uniform “tricked” into appearing in porn film
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38 degrees according to the big thermometer outside the funeral home this morning. Wasn’t it like 90 just a couple weeks ago? Gotta love the desert…
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Yeah, I skipped last week, so what?

From the home office in Boise Idaho, the Friday Five:

1. What is your favorite scary movie? Scary movies are bad.
2. What is your favorite Halloween treat? Candy. All candy.
3. Do you dress up for Halloween? If so, describe your best Halloween costume. No, so N/A.
4. Do you enjoy going to haunted houses or other spooky events? Sure.
5. Will you dress up for Halloween this year? Not bloody likely.

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“There is no expedient to which a man will not go to avoid the labor of thinking.” – Thomas A. Edison
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OK, this guy is a total nutcase, of the Tim McVeigh type. He claimed to be a demolitions expert – he was a truck driver. He claimed to be a sniper – he shot expert once. He claimed to be a Green Beret – he was a truck driver!

He was stationed at Fort Ord and Fort Lewis, the two army posts I at which I was stationed during my years in the army. Suppose I ever met him? Nope, he was a truck driver in an engineering battalion. M.I. geeks don’t associate with anyone whose GT score is below 100.

Glad they caught this jackass, but it’s too bad he was military. McVeigh did enough damage, and the string of spouse killings is no ray of light either.

So, here’s a discussion question (not an invitation to a flame war) – Does the military attract violent men, do men become violent from being in the military, or is the correlation not statistically significant and the media is blowing it out of proportion? Discuss.
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Coach tapes girls locker room. Yeah, like it’s an isolated case or something.
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Anna Nicole gets second season on E!
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Got the coolest catalog yesterday, although simultaneously one of the most unusual. I think a number of folks on my gift list will be getting something from this fine organization. It’s cool, it’s about giving, yada yada yada. Read about them.

I’m a big fan of direct-action charities. I don’t give to the Sierra Club because they are a bunch of paid lobbyists. I give what I can to the Nature Conservancy, though, because they do one thing – buy land. If you want to save nature, the best thing to do is buy land and stop others from messing it up. That’s what NC does. Heifer International doesn’t give people food, they give them the means to eat. The old adage about teaching a man to fish applies so well here. And, the gifts range in price from $10 to $5000. For five grand, you give a village or two an entire menagerie, but for those of us with more modest means, a flock of chickens is affordable, or a share in a goat. That just sounds silly, but it’s a good thing.

In the midst of the consumerism which most of us indulge in, we could stand to help others, right? The USA is a very affluent country, overall.
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Just updated the site a little, adding a new Thought, this one about LJ.
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CNN repeatedly mentioned last night that John Mohammed, although former army, was never trained as a sniper.

As has been said repeatedly by anyone with any firearms training, 150 meters is not sniper range. If you miss a slow-moving target at anything closer than 300 meters with a scope, you’re just a bad shot.
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Made a couple userpics for fun, since nobody requested anything today:

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_Tuesday_

Weblogs, blogs, online journals – all the same thing, different ways of referring to the same phenomenon. This phenomenon is not new, although you’d think it was invented in 2001 by the sounds of the media coverage of the blogging revolution, the traditional media way of describing nearly anything they don’t really understand but feel may be destabilizing their way of business. In my opinion, weblogs are part vanity site and part content management.

Like most personal websites, mine has long had a series of personal posts from me to the adoring public. My adoring public tends to be geeks, and not very many of them either. Nor do they seem to adore me too awful much, but I digress. The entire purpose of a vanity site, as personal websites were once called with derision, is to tell the world about yourself, to stake a claim to a tiny piece of the electronic zeitgeist. To that end, we old-school webgeeks painstakingly worked on webpages that looked like parts of a whole, building our own menus of links in text editors with exciting names like vi and notepad. It is a tedious way to update a site, and so many vanity sites tend to fall into disrepair. Fortunately, nothing actually decays online, so long as your host stays viable. There are a plethora of dead sites out there, with “last updated” dates in the last century.

Businesses which publish frequently-changing content online need a way to make that process simple, as well as accessible to the vast majority of their employees who are scared of that whole cyberspace information superhighway thing in the magic box. So, some clever folks came up with content management systems (CMS). The author of a document doesn’t have to know anything about HTML, CSS, tags, links, and other such exciting geek stuff. The author just writes up his story in whatever (usually proprietary but sometimes web-based) interface the CMS uses. This separation of content and format is usually based on Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which kick serious butt in general.

So, we had serious tools for businesses, costing thousands of dollars, used by CNN and CNet and other big news sites. And, we had the personal users typing away in their text editors, hoping they didn’t miss a closing tag and hose their layout. Along came weblogging tools. The best-known tool is Blogger, and others include Movable Type, Greymatter, PHPNuke, and Livejournal. Livejournal was started in March 1999, Blogger in August 1999, and Movable Type in October 2001; I can’t find authoritative start dates for the Greymatter and PHPNuke projects. For most people, the two big players are the two oldest: Livejournal and Blogger. I’m a big LJ fan, and I’ll try to explain why.

All weblogging tools allow comments, although many users may disable that capability. Although I had a decent number of people coming to my site with my old manual system, I had no way for them to comment aside from email or a guestbook. The guestbook, like most guestbooks, has been largely stagnant for years; almost nobody emailed me from my site. So, interactivity being the hallmark of the web, weblogs allow a discussion to occur centered on any comment you put on your site.

I wanted a way to keep my website looking fresh, without the pain of editing a full page of HTML each time I had something to say. LJ has been very effective in fooling people that come to my site, making them think I actually have new content almost daily. LJ embeds into the HTML of my homepage, allowing me to use it as a CMS for my own page. But, the great thing about LJ is the community.

When you join LJ, your comments are on their servers. This is often a problem, as their servers have issues due to expansion beyond the founder’s wildest dreams. The architecture of the LJ code, some have said, is not really capable of handling the load to which it is subjected, and the servers slow down too often. These are valid complaints, in my experience, but I’m still sticking with the service. The good thing about a central repository is that every LJ user is findable in some way. It may be a tedious way of going through every user, which number is approaching a million, but it is possible to find anyone on LJ. It’s easier if they want to be found, as LJ has “interests” to search, as well as having regional searches. If you want to find everyone in your town that has a journal, you can. The immediate outgrowth of the searchability of LJ is the Friends Page. Rather than visit 10 different blogger sites, you can just go to your own Friends Page, which is in a style you specify, and view all the entries written by people (or communities) that you find interesting. No need to search with Google or wander around Blogspot, you can just hit the Random button on LJ. Or, look at the people that others find interesting. Many times I have added friends that were friends of older friends. Very goofy-sounding, I know, but the web of connections is the big draw to LJ.

When people join LJ and then leave to start a blog on their personal site, I just look at the single line of code it took me to embed my journal on my homepage, and wonder why.

Livejournal – because you like to think people care.

Every few months, I get involved in an exchange with someone online that makes me wonder if it’s possible to have a reasoned discussion with people below the age of 26. I wonder if I was as resistant to rational thought at that age, and as incapable of responding to a counterpoint with anything more intelligible than “yeah? Well you’re old!”

I know that people in their teens and early 20s have always felt they knew everything and that whatever time they grew up in was completely different from every other period of history, but I swear I was not as self-important and arrogant when I was 20.
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