Category Archives: Uncategorized

old man collapses

having grown up in the northeast, lived just a hop skip and a jump from the old man while at dartmouth and hiked a good deal in the white mountains, i was sad to see that the ancient rock formation collapsed recently. it’s hard to imagine that nathian hawthorne once waxed poetic about the curious collection of rocks:

“Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote: ”It seemed as if an enormous giant, or a Titan, had sculptured his own likeness on the precipice.” We are titans of another sort these days. Hawthorne wrote that if a viewer of the Great Stone Face walked up too close to it, ”he lost the outline of the gigantic visage, and could discern only a heap of ponderous and gigantic rocks, piled in chaotic ruin one upon another.””

beck’s blo…er…journal

i see that

everyone and their sister

is talking about
beck’s blog

[ or, more precisely his journal ]. intrigued, i decide to check it
out with the appropriate degree of skepticism. and despite my best
attempt to view the journal through jaded and cynical lenses, i
have to admit that i’m impressed. although it appears to be updated
sporadically, entries like
press
junk and junket

might just make me a regular reader:

“interviews range from chit chat about your favorite
food to justifications for your actual existence. usually what
interviewers do is find something that somebody said somewhere
about you that wasn’t particularly nice, then ask you “a lot of
people think or say blabedy blah about you, what do you think about
that?” its the tactic they’re taught in school; to find the
‘conflict’, flesh it out and get their story. which is ok when
you’re doing a story about a kid who gets stuck in the bottom of a
well, but with someone who’s writing some silly little songs and
prancing around a stage, its kind of overkill (unless you’re
mainlining drugs of mass destruction or you’re locked in heated
oasis battle). otherwise its just tedious–“a lot of people say
you’re unoriginal, a lot of people say you have no soul, a lot of
people say your last album ended your career”, ad nauseam. here’s
my view on this kind of thing, though its no justification or
intended to change one’s aesthetic sense; one could admire the
actual physical feat of standing under 110 degree lights, 2 hours
sleep, a scrutinizing audience, and trying to sing in tune without
actually being able to hear anything, etc. I don’t tend to rip on
other bands in the press, cos I think its a waste of time and
energy and I know what goes into making a record, touring, press,
etc. I only have respect for people who go through the mill and
down the gauntlet just to play a few tunes for
people.”

no rss feed, a restrictive legal statement on
copying content and use of the word ‘Cos’ are all definite
turn-offs, but hearing the faint sounds of a coherent, strong voice
might just stop me from passing over
beck

the next time i go shopping for tunes.

i finished!

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: Attacks, Tools, Incidents

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.”

getting ready for the marathon

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.