it was the hardest thing i’ve ever done in my life, but i finished the marathon. i’ll gradually get back into the swing of things over the next few days. hopefully i’ll get around to writing about the whole experience in the next day or two. i’m not sure why people put their bodies through things like marathons, but at the same time, i can’t say i won’t run another one. now it seems it’s time to dig through a mountain of email, which is the last thing i want to do right now.

Days of the Honeynet is a great vignette on all the Not Fun Things that can happen when you intentionally let your guard down in the wild, wild, web [ and internet ]:

:Among other benefits, running a honeynet makes one acutely aware about “what is going on” out there. While placing a network IDS outside one’s firewall might also provide a similar flood of alerts, a honeypot provides a unique prospective on what will be going on when a related server is compromised used by the intruders.

As a result of our research, many gigabytes of network traffic dumps are piling up on the hard drives, databases are filling with alerts, rootkits and exploit-pack collections are growing.”

kris and i are getting ready for the marathon, so things might be a little slow for a few days. the race isn’t until sunday, but we’re heading to cincinnati tommorrow for a little rest and relaxation before the run. i had big plans of moblogging the marathon, but it looks like we might just go low tech for this one. old school analog.

leave some ice in the freezer. i might need some when i get back.

from the apparently-i’m-always-the-last-to-know department, i happened upon 2blowhards by way of morelikethis. good stuff if you’re into loquacious verbosity and wordy witticisms.

given that i’m experimenting with wikis in a variety of private contexts, it’s interesting to see the recent flurry of comments related to wikis and blogs. i think kevin marks comes up with one of the most cogent analysis:

“Blogs amplify individual voices. Unlike mailing lists, they don’t get lost in the hubbub. Wikis are different – they blur authorship, and drive towards a consensual style. Blogs’ temporal flow creates an affordance for conversation that is diluted and washed away in Wikis.”

i think this is why blogs and wikis are perfectly complementary, and in most cases can live together in perfect harmony. sometimes a little blurred authorship and consensus building is good and sometimes you need a strong voice with a conversational style. this is a far more important to picking and using the right tool in the right context, as compared to the relatively trivial criticism that wikis are ugly [ which, of course, they sometimes are ]. but i don’t think ugliness is an inherent trait of wikis. the osaf wiki certainly has as much going for it, aesthetically speaking, as your average blog.

so i boxed-up the ibook, which if you’ll remember is a lemon disguised as an macintosh and took it to the local office max to be shipped back to apple. i walk up the counter and have the following conversation, which is yet another bit of evidence that i’m not the freakish outlier that apple keeps insisting i am:

me: walks up to counter holding boxed lemon
clerk: got a laptop?
me: yeah.
clerk: what kind?
me: mac. laptop.
clerk: yeah. we see a lot of those. it’s incredible. i’m glad i have only peecees, they sure seem like they’re less trouble.

it looks like i missed a bullet with all the issues at cornerhost. somehow, luck was on my side, and my machine wasn’t affected. michal, the force behind cornerhost, has put together a nice set of packages and has managed to attract a cadre of smart people as customers, including brent simmons, sam ruby and mark pilgrim [ just to name a few ].

how do you get and keep customers like this? service. almost without fail, michal is in constant, early and often communication when things go awry. they always will. and when they do you want to have someone like michal around. he’s a great example of using genuinely great service to differentiate yourself in what would otherwise be the cut-throat commodity trenches.

oh yeah. serverbeach sucks.