Porno scanner vs. metal detector

Yesterday I passed through security at RDU Airport. There were two lines to screen passengers and I was in one with the metal detector. Though there was a crowd of people in the other line, waiting their “turn” to pass through the porno scanner, I was made to wait at the entrance of the metal detector though no one was in front of me. Only once another TSA agent saw that the porno scanner wouldn’t be empty any time soon did I get waved through the metal detector.

This is in contrast to my last visit to the airport, where the metal detector crowd was unimpeded. I don’t know if yesterday’s behavior is the norm now but it certainly seemed unusual.

God, I miss my civil liberties.

In St. Charles

I’m finishing up my first 24 hours in St. Charles. Been a day of sales training, though this time around I haven’t been the one doing the training. That may change tomorrow, though.

Things are starting to get exciting with work. I may be busy very soon now with that, and that’s a good thing. I’m enjoying my job and chances are I will enjoy it even more in the near future.

Great three day weekend

I took the day off Friday thinking I would be going to the Rush concert with my brother. Once the date was moved, I opted to take the family to the North Carolina Zoo instead. Before I left, though, I welcomed two new neighbors to the neighborhood.

We made it to the zoo around lunchtime. After buying our season membership, the first thing we did was eat our lunch on the member deck. It was fun remembering the last time we had all eaten there: strollers were involved!
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Cheap thoughts: muddy paws

After spending lots of time lately wiping our dog’s muddy paws, I discovered a good way to keep the dirt out. I had been thinking that some kind of socks or dog shoes would be a good way to keep mud out of the house but I found a way that’s even better.

It seems the mud tends to stick not on our dog’s pads but inside the claws themselves. I figure some kind of treatment (like glue, perhaps) that could fill in the gaps inside the claws would go a long way in keeping the hard-to-reach dirt out of our dog’s paws.

Now, do I feel brave enough to try it?

Tom Fetzer is fighting cancer

I have often taken issue with his political views, but I was sorry to hear Tom Fetzer is fighting cancer.

From an idiot blogger: get well soon, Tom.

Tom Fetzer, the well-known North Carolina Republican and former mayor of Raleigh, is fighting cancer.

Fetzer, who will turn 56 this month, said Friday that he began feeling sick and run down about six weeks ago. After a CT scan found a mass in his abdomen, he was diagnosed two weeks ago with a form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

He recently began chemotherapy treatments at Rex Cancer Center.

“Cancer is a random and unpredictable monster,” he said. “My doctors have given me great confidence I will be able to overcome this. They tell me this form of cancer responds well to chemotherapy.&”

via Former Raleigh mayor Fetzer is fighting cancer – State – NewsObserver.com.

Nothing by yourself

I was speaking the other day to a friend who’s one of the City of Raleigh’s leaders. He was telling me about the book he’d been reading, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. Though there are many insights in Gladwell’s book, my friend was particularly taken with the point Gladwell made that no one does it alone.

“It’s true,” he told me. “The people who think they made it themselves are fooling themselves. Everybody, everybody who’s ever ‘made it’ did so with someone else’s help.”

I completely agreed. All my youthful naivety about how America is supposed to work – how we’re a classless society and ‘all men are created equal’ – has always been sheer fantasy. I look at some of the kids in my side of town, growing up in some of the toughest situations imaginable. The deck is so overwhelmingly stacked against them that it’s a wonder anyone manages to escape the cycle of poverty and violence.
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Talking to the Digital Connectors about blogging

I was invited to the Saint Monica Teen Center to speak tonight on the topic of blogging to the kids involved with Raleigh’s Digital Connectors. I’d been looking forward to this talk for over a week as I love speaking to kids about technology.

Not having a real outline on what I should discuss, I began by explaining how I got into blogging, what keeps me going, and then took questions about some of the stranger happenings that I’ve experienced because of my blog. After nearly ten years of blogging, I’ve gained quite a few of these “strange experiences” and my biggest problem tonight was deciding which ones I wanted to share!
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BackWPup WordPress vulnerability

Looking over my logfiles tonight, I noticed a host trying to access a file I don’t have, backwpup.php.

46.4.202.87 – – [31/Mar/2011:19:00:03 -0400] “HEAD /wp-content/plugins/backwpup/backwpup.php HTTP/1.1” 403 – “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”

It turns out this is a WordPress plugin that has a bug which lets an attacker traverse the file system. In other words, an attacker could then view any file on the server that’s accessible to the webserver process.

I hadn’t seen it before but it hasn’t been out too long. I don’t use that particular plugin but those who do should be aware.

Google still looking to spread Google Fiber

It looks like all hope is not lost on Google Fiber coming to Raleigh (or Durham, or any of the other dozens of NC cities hoping to get it). Tanner points to this update from the announcement on Google’s blog:

Update 4:15PM: We’ve heard from some communities that they’re disappointed not to have been selected for our initial build. So just to reiterate what I’ve said many times in interviews: we’re so thrilled by the interest we’ve generated—today is the start, not the end the project. And over the coming months, we’ll be talking to other interested cities about the possibility of us bringing ultra high-speed broadband to their communities.

Perhaps there’s hope for high-speed Internet in North Carolina after all?

Cheap Thoughts: kicking it

The meaning of the word “to kick” is ambiguous. Early in its existence it meant “to quit” as in phrases such as “kick the habit,” “kick the bucket.” Yet it is also used to mean “to start something,” as in “kick it.”

Kinda interesting how that happened.