I was moaning about how the R.E.M. that played Friday night at Alltel Pavilion was not the same R.E.M. I once loved. My big gripe was the lack of original drummer Bill Berry.

As my buddy (?) Scott pointed out, Bill Berry WAS at the show, surprising the crowd (and apparently the band, too). He took to the skins for a few songs, too.

The crowd (and band) went wild. I would have been in heaven. Now I’m kicking myself for not making it out there.

Thanks anyway, guys!

I thought up a neat way to let DHCP help keep a network secure. The way most DHCP servers are set up now, they dish out IP addresses to random systems which appear on your network. Once the box is on the net, it can do all sorts of damage, like release the Blaster virus.

I’m going to play around with making DHCP send a “quarantine” IP address to any new systems on the network, providing it no gateway or other info. Once that system has been suitably vulnerability scanned, THEN it would get a real IP. It would initially get a low renewal rate on its quarantined IP, so that once it was clean, it will immediately get its new address.

It won’t stop all problems, but it does bring an extra measure of security to the network.

An ancient manuscript of Archimedes has been discovered that shows the mathmatician dealt with concepts of infinity.

If modern techniques had been around much earlier to revive his ancient scribblings, modern mathmatics might have been centuries ahead of its current state.

Cool stuff!

A Greensboro woman is so controlling that she insisted on using science to guarantee she gave birth to a girl. If that wasn’t enough, she demanded that the girl be born on her birthday.

How’d you like to have her as a mother? Can you say “dysfunctional family?”

The company that offered her this miracle is Microsort (not to be confused with Microsoft), a spinoff of the Fairfax, VA-based Genetics & IVF Institute. While I’m all for the advancement of medical science, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do something. Tipping the gender scales one way or another has global ramifications. This is just going too far.