Photographer, Boatbuilder, IT Guru, Writer, Musician, Therapist, Masseur, Firearms Enthusiast (in other words, a Generalist)
Ok I guess I’ll cut The Sun a little bit of slack, since their game is tabloid to begin with. But characterizing Sheyla Hershey as a “housewife” is a bit out of line. No “housewife” would ever do this to herself. It’s just impractical. She is a performer, and is apparently trying to enhance her visibility in that arena.
Darryl and I went shooting after work on Friday. We pumped about 100 rounds through a Springfield XD45. Nice action, enjoyed it. We were shooting at The Range in Stafford. According to the gentleman behind the counter, the place has been there for fourteen years. It’s a decent range with fourteen lanes. Hot, though. My eyebrows were sweating. Next time I need to remember to wear a hat. My hair’s too long for hot range action. I like the ammo prices at The Range, they reload there, so it’s significantly cheaper than buying ammo at Wal-Mart. My groupings were pretty good, but not what they should be. As for the Springfield, I like it. Empty, it’s lighter than the Sig P220 I used to carry, because the Springfield has a polymer frame (like a Glock). In fact, field-stripped, the frame alone could pass for a toy. But loaded, it’s fairly heavy, because the double-stack magazine holds 13 rounds. If I remember correctly, my Sig held 8.
It’s time to upgrade your house. With modern advances in Internet-based democracy, and the near ubiquity and apparent legal status of owning lockpick sets, which require a minor amount of skill, and “bump keys,” which require none at all, people can get into your stuff with zero effort. Don’t believe me? Ask me for a demo sometime.
Here are the fixes:
1) replace all your external locks. Abloy, Bilock, Medeco, Schlage Primus, Kwikset Smartkey are examples. Look for “bump-proof.”
2) of course that’s not enough. bad guys can still break and open windows. consider “security film,” a clear adhesive that goes directly on window panes which prevents this.
if bumping was new, i wouldn’t be mentioning it here for my friends. it’s not new, it’s a few years old, and it’s ALL OVER youtube and other venues.
Note to bump kiddies: bump keys ARE considered “burglary tools” in most states. It’s one thing to own them, but don’t get caught using them on someone else’s locks, or you will go to jail.
I finished Digital Fortress (audiobook), and started listening to Snow Crash this week. I am flipping back and forth periodically between Snow Crash, written by Neal Stephenson (who also wrote Cryptonomicon) and learning Spanish, por que es importante para mi.
So once you’re “in the system,” nothing is private. Nothing is sacred. Nothing. In this article, a man accused of murdering his wife and daughter has his google searches and other browsing habits made public. I’ll tell you why it bothers me — one, because it might have no relevance to your behavior, and two, because the average Joe will believe that what he types in that search bar is between him and his computer, and that’s all.
What if he was in the system for another reason, for example, someone hopping wireless networks used his to send a threatening message to a celebrity, and the FBI traced it back to his house. The forensic guys would still search the computer, and as long as he’s a suspect, that information is fair game. What if it happened to you? What do you think they’d find on YOUR home PC? I could tell you one thing they’d find on mine. Last week I remembered that someone at the office mentioned “tofu flavored to taste like human flesh.” You know, one of those geekish attempts at one-upping each other in level of grossness. So since I was near a PC at the time I remembered it, I searched it on Google. Will the forensics examiners make an assumption that I’m a cannibal now, just because I was reading about HuFu?
If you really want to get a handle on the sad state of affairs in terms of social order and modern discourse, take a look at NotAlwaysRight. Just scroll through some of the random quotes by clicking “Random Quote” a few times. Wow. People are Nucking Futs.
But not you. No, not you. I KNOW that everyone that reads this site (all three of you) are reasonable people who would never act like these examples.
Someone at work heard of my interest in Cryptonomicon, and recommended that I check out Digital Fortress, a Dan Brown (I know…) novel (fiction of course) about the NSA, and an “unbreakable” code. It’s an interesting book so far, but it’s a bit frustrating to experience technical details that are incorrect or grossly misleading. I hate when writers do that. There’s so little good crypto fiction out there that what’s out there should be vetted by someone in the business prior to publication. Bits vs bytes, bad buzzwords, and even worse, terrible character names. I mean, come on, “Trevor Strathmore?”
So driving home yesterday, I noticed a HAMMER in the road in the oncoming lane. I did NOT pull over, dash across busy lanes of traffic and pick it up. I kept driving, along with the other hundreds of folks in traffic with me. I wonder how many of them were visualizing the potential disaster which awaited some innocent fellow traveler… a big truck runs over the hammer just right, sending it flying through the windshield of an oncoming car and killing its occupant.
So the other day, Sunday morning I think it was, I woke from a dream in which my wife was asking me, “Who is iang?” She was pronouncing it as a word, but in my mind I saw it spelled that way. I take dreams as hints, so I immediately cracked open the laptop (what? we don’t ALL sleep with a laptop within reach?) and opened a Google window, typing in iang. Imagine my surprise when the second entry is directly relevant to recent experience and reading:
iang.org
Blog on Financial Cryptography · Free Banking Page · Papers · European Digital Money · Rants · Crypto Fiction Reviews · SSL Considered Harmful …
iang.org/ - 2k - Cached - Similar pages
Unsolved and Solved Ciphers
Elonka maintains a list of well-known unsolved codes and ciphers. A couple of the better-known unsolved ancient historical scripts are also thrown in, since they tend to come up during any discussion of unsolved codes.
Elonka’s list includes a mention of the fascinating Voynich Manuscript, an old unsolved illustrated manuscript. Voynich is very similar to the Codex Seraphinianus in that it is also illustrated and unsolved. I actually own a copy of the Codex. I found it interesting that Elonka doesn’t mention the Codex, and emailed to mention that fact. No response yet.
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