Archive for August, 2006

a small request of the NC-DOT

Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006

I have a small request to make of the NC-DOT, if there are accidents on the interstate at I-40 and I-540 which backs traffic up 10 miles to NC-751, can we please, please make use of the expensive electronic information signs on the interstate to warn people?  There’s a difference between a small traffic slowdown […]

a sign of the apocalypse?

Saturday, August 19th, 2006

Hmm, someone should go check the “rapture index,” I’m about to link to an article at Cato Unbound - the Cato Institute’s Blog. Richard Rodriguez write’s a beautiful article regarding Mexican Immigrants, their coming to America and what the clash of cultures means to second and third generation Mexican-American immigrants.
The response article by Victor […]

Friday, er, Thursday Snake Blogging

Thursday, August 17th, 2006

Took the day off and spent most of it working on the snake terrarium. Watching him pace (hmm, that doesn’t seem like the right word for a snake) his cage today made me particularly sad and motivated me to get about 95% finished. He could actually move in now - the only things […]

frustrations (social security, not work)

Tuesday, August 15th, 2006

Some days, I just can’t write about work frustrations. Not that I don’t want to or that I don’t think they’re interesting, just that it’s part and parcel of the whole confidentiality thing.
On days like today, it’s important to write about other frustrations (trust me on this). Today’s topic: scare tactics in government […]

things that make a security officer cry

Monday, August 14th, 2006

I spent a lot of time last week looking at an application in order to assess its security. The thing that was troubling me was that this is a web application and the primary form for data entry was defined like:
form name=”foo” method=”post” action=””
This means that the nothing happens when you hit submit on the […]

Memo to the left hand

Sunday, August 13th, 2006

To the left hand:  It is clear that you no longer know what the right hand is doing.  This weekend’s “accidental” dremeling was eerily similar to the wood carving incident in grade school where a supposed “art project” resulted in losing a chunk of left index finger.  Combined with the great butcher knife massacre where […]

Get your woodworking geek on

Saturday, August 12th, 2006

Just so you don’t think that I’m just a computer and photography geek, I wanted to update folks on another project. As I’ve said before, my wife does wildlife rehabilitation and managed to get conned talked into taking home a boa constrictor. Since they’re not native, he couldn’t be released once he was […]

Plagiarism in engineering

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

There’s an interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry, the link is behind the subscription firewall), about a mechanical engineering graduate student at Ohio University. After being invited to stay on after his masters and persue a Ph.D., he started having difficulty with his advisor. To help resolve his difficulties, he […]

Vacation pictures

Tuesday, August 8th, 2006

The vacation pictures checklist from earlier:

Get 22 rolls of slide film back from the developer [Check - received mid June]
Put 800 slides into transparancy holders so they are easy to look at on the light box [Check - took two nights]
Go through 800 slides to determine which are worth scanning [Check - took another two […]

a nomenclature question

Tuesday, August 8th, 2006

given that the vulnerability and the patches haven’t yet been released, does this constitute a “-1 day exploit?”