NASA’s Astronomy Picture Of The Day today features an amazing weather pattern, lake-effect snow. The pic of the day will change soon, so here’s the picture itself.
The pic is of the North American Great Lakes. Nothing like knowing that the snow that’s falling on you used to be in a lake to the north.
I was trying to learn how one might go about changing the password on a password-protected Mac disk image, but the first Google search result was the NSA’s Mac OS X ‘Panther’ Security Configuration Guide. (It’s a PDF file.)
I love the idea that my Mac could be as secure as the NSA would want it to be, and that this report has ‘Unclassified’ stamped all over it. Some of the steps are pretty severe, mostly OpenFirmware settings such as a bootup password and forcing boot from only one device. No mention of target disk mode, however. I can’t recall if that’s override-able with OF.
One of the more interesting security lock-down steps the NSA gives is to turn switch the default Sound In setting to line in, and keep a plug in the line in port of the computer. This is to avoid having the internal microphone on your laptop active. I’d bet there’s a classified version of this document that says to install a sound input device driver that doesn’t actually do anything, and set the sound in to that device. I wondered if such a dummy driver exists, and sure enough, the source code for it was already on my computer, right where Apple’s Developer Tools CD installed it as sample code. 
Still no answer on how to change the password for a disk image, though. I guess one is stuck with making a new image, mounting it, copying the information over, and deleting the old one.
Why is it that I’m still completely unable to search my own Xanga site?
I should be able to type a term into the little box up there, switch the popup to ‘HomerTheBrave,’ and click search.
Furthermore, if I include my name, I get no results. I’m looking for a specific entry, with a specific couple of words on it, and if I search Xanga I get too many results to mess with. If I add my name, I get NO results.
Why is this still fundamentally broken? It seems like Xanga would make more money (off of ‘featured results’) if people actually used the search function.
I’m diggin’ on Robert M. Jeffers’ guest ‘blogging on Atrios, like this one. Hopefully he’ll get a ‘blog of his own.
[..] So, it is the First Sunday of Advent, which means something.In the world, that means precious little; frantic for Christmas to come and go, the world is in a hurry. To the liturgical church, though, Christmas doesn’t begin until December 24th, and it doesn’t end until January 6th, on Epiphany. And before it ends, it will include two days of death: the Massacre of the Innocents, and the first Christian Martyr, St. Stephen. I mention that because Advent is actually akin to Lent, not to “December” on the American calendar. It is a time of preparation for shattering change, not for celebration of consumer excess.
Via JerryKindall: The Perry Bible Fellowship, which is a really funny and bizarre comic strip. The archive is here. Representative sample here, and here.
I think Benny Hill is funny. Like, really funny. Not funny like ‘man hands’ on Seinfeld, but funny like the Great Cosmic Joke.
Now, Benny Hill is not about the Great Cosmic Joke. He’s an NC-17 rated vaudevillian with nothing deeper on his mind than how to get men to laugh at jokes about sex. But he has moments of transcendence, especially when it comes to language and his inside-out perspective on TV production. He is the cosmic joke. He’s just seeing what he can get away with. Sometimes he cracks up at his own jokes, amazed that the audience is buying it.
He is the sage who repeats the same lesson a thousand different ways, only the lesson involves tits. And ass.
Alice has a picture of the San Antonio river walk on her site.
Some of my earliest memories are of the river walk. Somehow I remember being a very tiny kid, no more than 5 or 6 I suppose, with my parents on the river walk. It’s somewhere between memory and dream, since it’s kind of impossible for some of what I remember to have happened. I can cite Fellini’s ‘Roma’ to give some kind of idea, but not a lot of people have seen ‘Roma.’
The most vivid part is being at a glass blower’s shop. It’s the time around twilight, when there’s still a little light outside, and I’m with my parents in a storefront that would be completely empty except for a single row of glass trinkets on a plywood surface placed over big rolls of burlap that look like giant cinnamon rolls.
The whole place is dark, lit only by the dimly glowing orange of the glass furnace, which occupies the entire back wall. I’m enthralled by the tiny glass objects, caught up in the play of the orange light through their Newtonian surfaces.
One of the objects in particular draws my attention. I don’t know why. Maybe I had just seen ‘Bambi,’ or maybe we had seen deer along the road in central Texas, but I was drawn to a set of three amber-colored glass deer. There was a large mother deer, and two babies, and they were connected by tiny chains.
That is, there was a tiny copper collar on the mother deer, and from this collar came two tiny chains, and these chains were attached to two even tinier collars on the baby deer’s necks. I immediately assumed the chains had to do with keeping the set together, though thinking about it subsequently, I’ve always wondered what was up with those chains.
My parents were talking to the proprietor, a Mexican man in his 20s. He had re-opened the store so I could come in and find something. I don’t remember the back-story there; I must have been upset because my siblings had gotten to buy something and I hadn’t. I don’t remember causing a scene, but I might have. And I have no idea why, of all the places on the river walk, I would have ended up in the glass trinket shop.
What’s most dream-like about this part of the memory is that warm otherworldly orange glow, and the subsequent re-emergence into the cool twilight, deer and babies in hand. I felt like the world was full of wonder and peace, and that everywhere around the world there must be places as good and nice as the San Antonio river walk. I don’t remember having feelings like that as a kid, except in this fragment. I suppose that could be why I remember it, or why I’ve transformed it into what it is.
It’s almost over, but happy Buy Nothing Day, everybody.
I celebrated by waking up waaaay too late, making some coffee, eating some pumpkin pie leftovers, and watching ‘Kill Bill Vol. 2.’ I fear I’ll go and buy something, since I’m hungry for a sandwich (think: Bill explaining B.B. learning about life and death while he makes a sandwich), and I don’t have any fixin’s around.
‘Fixin’s,’ by the way, is one of those terms that defies proper punctuation. It’s the plural form, not the possessive, but if you say ‘fixings,’ then you lose the idiomatic flourish and you sound like a Yankee who wears his belt too tight.
Yesterday, for Thanksgiving festivities, I went and visited a friend of mine who invited me. He’s way off in a semi-rural sort of bedroom community on the eastside. They fed me full of good food and good company. Then I rushed off to the Shui house for more fun and frivolity. The Shui house has turned from being a place that attracts 20-something aimless hippies into something that attracts young brilliant people with a joi de vivre. They’ve turned a corner over there, I think, and good for them. And for me, because I got to hang out.
