Author: David

Think you’re practicing safe computing? Maybe. Get hacked on the fly is a video shot at McAfee’s Avert Labs Day late last year showing how you can be hacked just by visiting a site set up to do a drive-by malware exploit. Even behind a NAT router/firewall.

Safer than the example shown? A GOOD NAT/SPI firewall (preferably two: one hardware firewall and another software firewall) and a safer browser. You know the one I recommend. 🙂 (Yeh, I need to update the graphic in my sidebar, cos Opera 9.01 is out.)

Sidebar: Linux users, of course, are a bit safer, as are extremely small market share (what? under 3%?) Mac users. (Extremely small? WC3 surveys of internet use have Linux internet users with a slight edge over Mac users. That’s an upstart, open source, tinkerer’s OS beating out a highly-capitalized, old-line personal computer OS in user base. Apple must be doing something(s) wrong… *heh*)

Noted at Stuck on Stupid’s Presidential Straw Poll and Echo9er’s GREAT voicemail message (I think I’m gonna have to change mine to that and “suggest” it to the White House comment line… )

…and into the Academia Nut Fruitcake Bakeries?

Sorta.

I just had a contact from a marketing prof at an accredited state university (call it somewhere in the Southeast part of the country) asking permission to use one of my “tightwaddery” posts in an upcoming textbook. Now, marketing isn’t usually where one finds major Academia Nut Fruitcakes—that’s more likely to be in English or History or Education or “Wymyn’s Studies” departments—but still I checked the guy’s previous publications out. They seemed OK, so I sent him permission.

We’ll see what the book is like, since he offered to comp me a copy (250 words or so of my deathless prose outa 700 or so pages? A comp copy of the book seemed a fair offer. *heh*)

Now, the blog post the guy wanted to cite was at one of my less-used, less active blogs, but I figured it was worth importing, so here it is: The Joys of Being a Tightwad.

Make of it what you will.

I oughta search through some of my other blogs for more useful stuff. You’d never know…

🙂

This is just a drive-by post/update on Lovely Daughter’s lil pre-4th encounter with a guy who (in his words on the accident report) “saw the red light, but I thought I could make it” (?!?!?) for those who have commented (more in email than on the post—thanks to you all) on the “accident”. “Drive-by” update cos I’m still “snowed” (“sawdusted”?) under…

The semi-final estimate (not all parts pricing is in yet) places repairing the thing at about $1,000 less just a smidge under what her car actually cost to begin with, which was… less than 1.5 months off the new car lot.

Total, ya think?

But Yolanda Yaris did its job of protecting its “cargo”.

A coupla bye-bye pics of Yolanda Yaris:

Then…

(And no, that’s not what Lovely Daughter’s face looks like. Blurred out mostly cos of her work.)

And now…

Ins company’s playing “push the kid around” but they don’t know my Lovely Daughter very well. That’s kinda like messing with a force of nature… (But her Toyota dealership’s REALLY working with her, since they already know where she’s buying the replacement. *heh*)

Gots ta go. “The faster I runs the behinder I gets.”

A kinda shirtsleeve observation.

What would you call someone to whom people are only real in terms of what is to be gained or lost by using them? You know; you’ve met the kind. No conscience (except one that can be faked for a show of “sincerity” and humanity). Someone for whom a distorted self-image places them at the pinacle of existance, for whom others are just markers in a game.

A literate person would call such a person a sociopathic personality, or—depending on the extremity of their ego involvement and destructive manipulation and coercion of others—an ego-centric personality disorder bordering on, or crossing the border into, the psychopathic.

I simply call such a person a politician.

Seriously. Examine all the politiciqans you have met, have known or now know. Include the behaviors of politicians as you can piece them together from news reports (although reports from Mass Media Podpeople can be unreliable) and voting records, constituent contacts, etc.

Now, I have known some few politicians at the local level who were only borderline sociopaths, and some few who were (at least for a while) seemingly decent people. At the state level, I’ve known a couple who seemed to be real people.

At the national level? *whew!* Have to look long and hard to find the scant handful of politicians who ought not to be locked away in some deep, dark dungeon for the good of humanity.

Seriously.

Now, that’s not to say that politics is the only place where such critters can be found (although I’d dare say you’d find it impossible to spit ANYWHERE in a room full of congresscritters and NOT hit a sociopath). No, the entire Hivemind of Mass Media Podpeople is populated with these monsters (or self-made idiots who fit in well with the Hivemind), and Academia Nut Fruitcakes don’t fall far from the tree, either. In fact, this monstrous creature can be found rather abundantly among the clergy, sad to say (although admittedly in fewer numbers than among the political class, the Mass Media Podpeople and Academia Nut fruitcakes).

But the political class… that’s the motherlode of sociopathy.

Analyzing my head off at Stop the ACLU, Conservative Cat, TMH’s Bacon Bits

Just page on down if this isn’t up your alley. There’s more—different stuff—in posts below.

Tried out Ubuntu 6.06 “Dapper Drake” recently (interesting article/discussion here). I have to build another comp (or salvage/change over one of the Windows comps here) and really wring it out, cos trying it off a boot CD was… really cool! Recognized ALL the hardware, set things up and up came the really slick, immediately usable Ubuntu desktop. This seems to be easy enough for the proverbial Aunt Tilly. While it only came with Firefox installed by default, it has an easily accessible link to download and install Opera 9.

I LIKE! Now, if only I could find a Windows emulator that does a good enough job to let me use my music transcription software and sequencing/recording software with Ubuntu, I’d switch all but a coupla machines over to it and just keep the Windows machines around as a reference (for tech support). I already use cross-platform apps like Opera and Open Office for most other things.

In case anyone’s wondering… Yesterday, Spam Karma2/Askimet (yeh, I have ’em both installed) caught over 2,500 trackback spam comments. At least that’s what they reported. I dunno, cos although I usually go through ALL the reported SPAm to see if there were any false positives (and there are maybe 5 or 6 a week that are), I just did not have the time yesterday to go through more than 2,500 to see if there were any false positives.

So, in case you were wondering what may have happened to a trackback, that’s a possibility…

My Wonder Woman has a new lil camera. A nice lil HP Photosmart 433. Not top-of-the-line, but nice. She’ll probably use it for library stuff–web pages, newspaper press releases, etc. It has some basic audio-video capabilities on top of its primary still camera functions. For someone wanting a basic lil digital camera, this might be nice. Or maybe ya need a spare. Still OK. Takes up to 128MB memory cards, so the lil 3megapixel+ camera can store quite a few photos.

And it fits her hand nicely, too. Cute lil thang. (The camera, too.)

Learning what its like to run two routers/firewalls. Interesting. Should I add a third? *LOL* Really, just needed to subnet out my wired network (slightly better security), and now that I have a new lil Netgear WGR614 (wireless) router/firewall w/NAT and SPI, switching out the “old” Asante wireless router (and holding it as a spare–it’s a manuf replacement for one that died) seems like the right thing to do, eh? *heh* I do these silly things so folks can shake their heads and laugh at me…

Anybody want a flaky motherboard? One of the computers here at twc just up n died. No problem, really, just… drat. Pull alla parts n bag ’em. Pull the mobo and trash it. New mobo (heck, why not new mobo, processor, memory… yeh! That’s the ticket! :-)), parts back in and… oh, heck. It was my last Windows 98 computer. Sentimental attachment to some of that old software, but… hey! It’s make a nice new Linux comp, now wouldn’t it?

All’s well that ends well!

*heh*

Now, where’s that mobo I wanna use, anyway… it MUSt be around in this mess somewhere…

Yeh, yeh. Maybe I should wait til I move my office setup downstairs. *sigh*

🙂

This is an Open Trackbacks Alliance post. Open trackbacks to THIS POST all weekend long. Link to THIS POST and track back. More below the Important Announcement…

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Get your nominations for the Blogs of Summer in!

Beginning Monday, you’ll be able to vote for blogs nominated in each of the six categories.

1) Chick & Mommy Blogs
2) Humor & Satire Blogs
3) Milblogs/Military Support Blogs
4) Random Blogs That Don’t Fit a Category
5) Kitty Kat Blogs (And Other Pets too!)
6) Political Blogs (Or Something Close)

Check it out now, get your nominations in and prepare to vote!

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As I said, this is an open trackback post open all weekend long. Link to this post and then track back. If you want to host your own linkfests, check out

Also note the other fine blogs featuring linkfests at Linkfest Haven.

Via Terry Dillard, the info below is a kinda shirtsleeve comparison of the Fair Tax, the current Income Tax and the Flat Tax proposal. The same information can be seen in table format here (although the table format might best be viewed in screen resolutions of 1024X768 or above).

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Do you want to know why I support the FairTax? Check the various issues below and see how the Income Tax, a Flat Tax, and the FairTax would affect each situation.

Continue reading “Fair Tax Compared to Flat Tax and Current Income Tax”

This is an Open Trackbacks Alliance post. Link to THIS POST and track back. More below the pointer to an Important Post at Chaos Manor Musings.

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Jerry Pournelle’s always worth listening to, and no less with this post. A sample:

Newt Gingrich and others are calling it World War III. By definition, it cannot be a World War unless the United States is actively involved. Should we be in this war? The question is, what is the national interest of the United States, and what is our best way of protecting that interest?

…The Bush Doctrine says that any nation that protects and harbors terrorists who attack the United States is an enemy of the United States and can be a target for US military action. That is the primary Bush Doctrine, and I think nearly every reader here will accept that.

An extension of the Bush Doctrine is that planting democracies will further world stability and be detrimental to terrorism. That is a secondary Bush Doctrine, and I for one do not accept it…

It’d profit you much to read the whole thing. There’s more including some contributions from a reader on the Wegman Report—a bombshell exploding upside da head of global warmists… Hint: the “hockey stick” is dead, dead, dead.

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As I said, this is an open trackback post. Link to this post and then track back. If you want to host your own linkfests, check out

Also note the other fine blogs featuring linkfests at Linkfest Haven.

See that cute lil graphic in my left sidebar? The one with the waggledy tail purty flars n says “Blogs of Summer”? Yeh, that one. Well, Lyn @ Bloggin’ Outloud has this thing about “Blogs of this, that and t’other” and thought something along the lines of, “If I have this really cool idea I can flog as ‘promoting other blogs” maybe I can boost my TTLB ranking and traffic” or something like that.

Yeh, I know he didn’t SAY that, but I’m half-a-mind reader (and I have half a mind to use doing things like that, too). Check the blogroll out. Check out Lyn’s promo posts for The Blogs of Summer, and start nominating blogs tomorrow (at least, that’s what I understand the process is). The categories for (Best?) Blogs of Summer are (so far, maybe for sure, even):

1) Chick & Mommy Blogs
2) Humor & Satire Blogs
3) Milblogs and Military Support Blogs
4) Random Blogs That Don’t Fit a Category
5) Kitty Kat Blogs (And Other Assorted Pets)
6) Political Blogs

So, head on over and make your nominations for “best of” the Blogs of Summer.

Lyn’s strongarmed a few of us weak reeds into hosting various categories, and I just sent an “OK, OK! Quit twisting my arm!” (*VBG*) email about hosting the political Blogs of Summer category. We’ll see how that goes, won’t we, campers?