All the media sites have been covering the FBI's arrest of a MN teenager, Jeffrey Lee Parson, in connection with the recent Blaster virus that swept the Internet a week ago. The FBI seems to see this as a major coup for the revamped, high-tech, post-9/11 agency. "With this arrest, we want to deliver a message to cyber-hackers here and around the world," said U.S. Attorney John McKay in Seattle. "Let there be no mistake about it, cyber-hacking is a crime. ... We will investigate, arrest and prosecute cyber-hackers." What doesn't, however, merit much mention is the fact that Parson's variant of the Blaster worm ("Blaster.B") only infected about 7,000 of the estimated half-million computers that were infected with Blaster and all its variants. Which to me sounds a lot like the FBI's "message" to "cyber-hackers" is more talk than action. What is also interesting is that Parson's height and weight (6'4" and 320 lbs) is placed much more prominently than most any information about his actual crimes. Since his physical stature obviously doesn't have any bearing on the case against him, I wonder how high his height and weight would be placed if he were 5'11" tall and weighed 185 lbs?

Comments: 3 Posted by david on 31 August 2003 at 6:08 PM

I was "privileged" enough to see the band 2 for Flinching tonight at Sky's sparsely attended beer stube. 2 for Flinching seems to specialize in rap-rock covers, and we were lucky enough to get god-awful renditions of songs by both Linkin Park and Evanescence. They even threw in some straight rap in the form of the Eminem/Dr. Dre song "Forgot about Dre." Fortunately for those of us who have soured on the rap-rock phenomenon, 2 for Flinching threw in covers of The White Stripes, The Strokes, Sublime, Good Charlotte, and others; this was apparently an attempt to remind their audience that they could mess up rock songs as well as rap-rock. So, should you ever find yourself in the situation of having dropped more money on a cover than you should have only to find that 2 for Flinching is the featured band, I can only recommend that you start drinking early and keep drinking all night long; I can't contemplate how you'd make it through a 2 for Flinching show otherwise. Even the band agrees, as they were the drunkest people at Sky's tonight.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 31 August 2003 at 12:02 AM

michael, Chris, and I have been thinking about having another weblog party. For those of you who don't remember the last weblog party, this is an event where we invite all of the WashU webloggers we know over to apartment 12 for an evening of fun and entertainment. Last time we had a pretty good turnout; certainly more people than we had chairs for. This time around we have more seating, so perhaps more people will come.

Anyway, due to a number of issues, we don't think we're going to be able to pull it off on a weekend night. Our two options are Thursday, September 4 or Sunday, September 7. Any preferences?

Comments: 3 Posted by david on 29 August 2003 at 8:30 AM

For those of you who were at Eric's wedding this past spring, I've finally gotten around to putting the pictures I took up online. I posted them all at shutterfly in case anyone wants to order prints. Here's the link. Be prepared to be amazed by low-light, digital zoom pictures of Eric, Carla, Jared, Cuz, Luke, John, drunk DJ guy, Gene, me, Stew, Ann, Carla's dad, and many more.

I've ordered a sample print from shutterfly to see what they're like. If things come back looking pretty good, I'm probably going to post quite a few more photos there.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 28 August 2003 at 10:39 PM

I guess I have the apartment to myself this weekend. michael is off on his third world vacation and Chris is flying back to Florida for a long weekend.

Anyway, as I'm writing this, there is a truck stuck in the gate to our parking lot. The girl driving the pickup apparently couldn't center herself in the opening and drove as far to the left as possible, but she managed to catch the gate. She rove back and forth a few times trying to get the truck off the gate, but only managed to put more scratches in her truck. I imagine turning the wheels might have helped, but that didn't seem to occur to her so she just drive straight forward and straight back a few times. Then she called in backup, in the form of some friends or family who managed to get her extricated. I just hope the gate survives. She's out of the gate, but it doesn't seem to want to close. No, I spoke too soon. As I was typing that sentence, the gate closed. So now all is fixed except that truck.

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 14 August 2003 at 9:19 PM

On Jeopardy! today one of the contestants on the Teen Championship mispronounced the category he wanted a clue from. Instead of saying "Salute the flag for $600" he said... well, you can guess what he said. But why wouldn't the Jeopardy! people do a little touchup before broadcast to fix it? I hear they can do that for music recordings and stuff, so you'd think they would fix one mumbled word on tv.

Anyway, I have meetings, meetings, and more meetings at work tomorrow, but hopefully I'll get a chance to work on one of my projects in the afternoon. And I get free pizza at the department bowling event on Friday afternoon, which is cool.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 13 August 2003 at 11:38 PM

The team I'm on at work is gearing up for a new version of their primary product, and this has necessitated a lot of meetings. Today I had about six hours of meetings. In order to make sure I was going to the right rooms every hour, I printed off a copy of my calendar before my first meeting, and then, because of some rescheduling, did the same after lunch. I usually pay attention during these meetings, but I find it hard to just sit there and listen to someone read an approach document, so I often doodle on whatever I have in front of me. Here's a highly marked up calendar that made it through most of my afternoon meetings with me:

I also have a calendar from my morning meetings and a couple of approach documents that look a lot like this. And tomorrow looks to be just as busy.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 11 August 2003 at 11:10 PM

For all you "West Wing" fans out there, I borrowed the following from a Lisa de Moraes TV Column in the Washington Post.

Good news for "West Wing" fans: Zucker says you won't notice the difference now that Aaron Sorkin, who created the show and penned nearly every episode, is gone.

"Nobody was better at the small banter and the small talk than Aaron Sorkin," Zucker generously conceded, but John Wells, the executive producer of "ER" and "Third Watch" who has taken over "WW," has penned two episodes of the White House drama that are "gut-wrenching and emotional."

In other words, "WW" is now another "ER."

"Where you may miss a little of the small talk in the hallway, you're going to be quite taken with how gut-wrenching and emotional [the coming season] is," Zucker said, acknowledging that "gut-wrenching and emotional" "is the hallmark of a John Wells show and that's what you're going to get."

Goody.

All of her articles make for good reading, and I'm not the only one who thinks so.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 11 August 2003 at 11:02 PM

I was in Evansville this past weekend. While there I had the pleasure of attending the Volksfest event put on by the Germania Männerchor. Those of you who know German know that Volksfest translates into Festival of People, which is as good a description of this event as any. In years past I've only attended during the day, when the people there are mostly sober and mostly there to eat the bratwurst and sauerkraut. This year I visited in the evening. The Männerchor has a huge yard behind their club, and it seemed like everyone of drinking age and inclination was there on Friday night. I couldn't turn around with seeing someone I went to hs with or someone who worked at Whirlpool last summer when I was there. And then there's the ambiance. Let's just say that no on would have blinked an eye if you had shown up in Lederhosen (or as one gentleman did, in a gorilla costume). And there's something a bit kitschy about having to buy not only the beer that you plan on drinking, but the cup or pitcher as well. Which means that the thrifty Germans in attendance had saved their pitchers from previous years and had an extra dollar to spend on beer. I just have a quaint plastic Männerchor pitcher. I guess I'll just have to back next year if I want to turn my pitcher into a real investment.

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 10 August 2003 at 11:30 PM

I don't like subject lines on email. If I just took the time to write three paragraphs about something, why should I then try to summarize it in a few words? Subject lines just cause people not to read the entire message. Besides, its not like other messages have subject lines. I don't write a little summary of a letter on the envelope before mailing it, and I don't provide a subject when I leave a voicemail message. So why should I have to come up with one for email? Enough is enough. I'm going to stop using subjects whenever it is appropriate for me to do so.

Comments: 6 Posted by david on 9 August 2003 at 3:23 PM

I know that police officers are above the law, but sometimes a little common sense would help them out. For example, if I were a police officer driving the wrong way down a one-way street without my lights or siren on, I probably wouldn't expect all of the on-coming traffic to kindly get out of my way. And then later, when I had gotten myself turned around and was going the proper direction on the road, I would give some sort of signal before making a left turn out of the right turn lane and cutting off a car that had the right-of-way.

And while we're on the subject of driving let me mention the SUV driver who briefly followed me on my way to work today. Apparently, my 35 mph clip through Forest Park was a bit too slow for this Expedition driver, because she chose to gun past me as soon as the road opened up. I'm sure she burnt a gallon of gas in the process, but she did get past me. But then we came to the road construction. Now, I was under the impression, gleaned primarily from television commercials that show SUVs scaling mountains and driving up vertical rock faces, that SUVs were pretty tough. But apparently the Expedition is not tough at all. Because this driver had to come to a full stop for all four of the spots in the road where the construction crew and made a cut through the asphalt and filled it in with gravel. Now, these can be a bit rough in my Echo, so I usually take my foot off the gas as I go over them and coast over at about 25-30 mph. But the Ford Expedition can't compete with my Toyota Echo in this category, because it must be stopped before preceding over rough ground at approximately 5 mph. Now why would you pay $40k for one of these things?

Comments: 2 Posted by david on 8 August 2003 at 8:39 AM

So PETA is well known for two things: their kindness to animals and their proclivity toward throwing blood on people who don't share their views. My question is this: if PETA doesn't believe in cruelty toward animals, where does the blood come from?

Comments: 1 Posted by david on 6 August 2003 at 11:54 PM

Well, it looks like things are back to normal. I hacked out a script to restore the archives from individual archive pages and it seems to be working. Jim has a script for importing from monthly pages, so soon everyone will have their posts back. And all the subdomains are back.

Expect a spate of less boring posts in the near future.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 3 August 2003 at 12:06 AM