I’ve rented too many cars with great tunes beamed from 22,300 miles above. Sirius satellite radio has finally worn me down. I think I’ll be picking up my own subscription soon!
Kiss Them For Me
Siouxsie And The Banshees
(music video on YouTube)
It glittered and it gleamed
for the arriving beauty queen
a ring and a car
now you’re the prettiest by far
No party she’d not attend
no invitation she wouldn’t send
transfixed by the inner sound
of your promise to be found
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My cousin Dave Turner loves his job with the Florida Fish And Wildlife Conservation Commission. His usual duties involve chasing down wandering gators and bears, believe it or not. Dave’s droll sense of humor usually earns him lots of airtime after the critter emergency is over.
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Got back this evening from Annapolis. My flight left 90 minutes late, which meant that I could’ve driven home faster. I think I’ll try that next time, since its so much cheaper if I just take my own car.
The day went well, as did the trip. I’ve got a head full of ideas: what-if scenarios that I’d like to see how the product would handle. Very few times has one of these ideas proven to be impossible, which is one of the things that really excites me about the product. There are very few things it cannot do!
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The nearby Mallinckrodt plant had a sulfuric acid spill this morning, prompting police to advise residents within a half-mile radius to stay indoors this afternoon. The fear was that rain would react with the acid (which it does violently, apparently), causing toxic fumes. We’re about a mile away, but that is still a little too close for comfort.
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I recently got a sneak peek at SiCKO [warning: self-playing Flash], Michael Moore’s new profile of the healthcare industry being released this weekend. Wow. If this doesn’t shame Americans into fixing our broken healthcare system, nothing will. It is very convincing, without pulling any punches. He lets people tell their stories.
Michael Moore may be the Upton Sinclair of our times: controversial mainly because he shines a light on problems we’d otherwise rather not think about. Love him or hate him, he makes you think. We could use a little more of that at a time when a bimbo like Paris Hilton is considered news.
MT.Net says check it out.
At a customer site today waiting for a database to update I decided to check up on my blog. Seems that SurfControl has flagged MT.Net in its “Blogs And Forums” list. Yay! I finally made someone’s list!
I’m in good company, as Jeff and Jamie made SurfControl’s list. The Hallie And Travis page, a blog running far longer than my own, didn’t make the cut. Well-known bloggers Chris O’Donnell and Doc Searls didn’t make the cut, either. With Doc’s hosted at a site named “weblogs.com,” one wonders what it takes to be flagged as a blog. Ironically, other websites I host on the very same machine as my blog are not blocked at all.
The process makes me think about those organizations who control the Internet floodgates, sometimes in secret. I had no idea I was on SurfControl’s radar until just now. What about Google filtering out search results at the whim of Chinese government bureaucrats? What if it happened here? If you get filtered by search engine (or a nanny proxy like Surfcontrol), you effectively disappear from the Internet, don’t you?
For the first time in a year I got to sit on the receiving side of a training session, this time for my new product, that open-source network management tool with the Zen-like name. Since the bulk of training came right after lunch (the crab melt at the Ram’s Head Tavern is teh bomb), I got a bit sleepy for a moment but soon rallied when the magic of the product became apparent.
Wow. Wow, wow, wow. This tool is amazing! Continue reading
Since I’ve been on the road this week, I set up OpenVPN on my Ubuntu laptop to ease the process of connecting to home. Boy, why didn’t I do this sooner? It’s so nice to easily access all of my home machines without adding more SSH tunnels. The OpenVPN-protected connections are quicker to connect than the SSH tunnels, too.
Geeky stuff like this makes me feel like a Linux stud. Yeah, boyeeee!
The new job is going well. I got here at noon yesterday and worked until 7. Didn’t get a lot of training due to other issues being addressed yesterday but learned a lot anyway. Should get a brain-full today with training all day long.
Annapolis seems nice from the little bit I’ve been outside. I especially enjoyed the sea breeze last evening. Its nice to be so close to the ocean. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to look around while I’m here.
Boingboing linked to a story of a New York Times reporter being held hostage in a Chinese toy factory. It illustrates the dysfunctional nature of Chinese authority. Basically, the almighty dollar trumps government authority.
It also reaffirms the story I’ve heard about Chinese police always doing their best to do absolutely nothing. Seems pretty consistent with my own observations of China.
