The Evil Eyebrow

Month: August 2008

  • Dragon*Con Prep

    Today is the last day pre-Dragon*Con which means there is plenty to do to get ready:

    Sleep – Won’t be doing much of that at the Con. I maintain about a 4 AM to 8 AM unconsciousness schedule

    Charge – We’re geeks, so we have a lot of electronic toys which need to be charged up, and their spare batteries also filled with electrons. I am once again renting a lens from Professional Photo Resources, the Canon f/2.8 L 70-200 IS. The “L” makes it awesome and the “IS” makes it an energy hog, so camera batteries need to be charged.

    Pack – That’s easy, but there are several options for party wear to bring, and it all has to fit in the car.

    Play – We have friends staying with us tonight, so we’ll be playing games and watching Mythbusters bust the Moon Hoax Myth.

    We’re looking forward to tomorrow and the weekend! Downtown Atlanta will be interesting, with 30,000 Dragon*Con attendees and the Alabama/Clemson game at the Georgia Dome with god knows how many fans and tailgaters.

  • More Photo Archive Fodder

    I love this picture.

    2785694098_920071a307_o

    I drove past this a few times while traversing the Lubbock, TX to Birmingham, AL southerly route (the northerly route goes through Oklahoma City and avoids this spot). This is Louisiana off of I-20.

  • Public Key Encryption

    Because I solved the issue I was having with Thunderbird, I’m ready to publish my public key for all and sundry to use.

    What does this mean? Well, from now on the emails you receive from me will be digitally signed and with the public key listed below you can confirm that they are from me1. Do I suspect that I’m being the target of multiple email address stealing thieves? No, but I’d rather start now than later when it becomes an issue. Insurance is something you purchase before you need it.

    It also means that anyone who goes through the trouble (and it is a bit of trouble, no matter what the websites say) to set up encryption on their email will be able to exchange fully encrypted emails with me. Do I suspect that some nefarious group is snooping on my emails? No (although my company explicitly says they have that right, as does my ISP, as does the NSA, FBI, law enforcement…), but I’d rather keep my private conversations private, from anyone. As it is right now, your emails flying around the ether are open for snooping by anybody who really wants to. Sure, innocent people have nothing to fear, but we shouldn’t tacitly agree to the snooping. I am not. I want to spread the encryption meme about and make it that much more difficult to access my communications.

    Join me in making it more difficult for the government, or anyone else for that matter, to monitor us. I promise that in the next few weeks, I’ll post a how-to for setting up public key encryption using Mozilla Thunderbird and GnuPG. There was a learning curve for me because most of the tutorials were written by and for people who spend a lot of time in front of a command line interface. I think there’s a market for a how-to that’s a bit more explicit.

    1This requires software. You don’t just check that public key against my email. As I say in paragraph three of this post, this is a bit of trouble to set up, but relatively seamless once it is

    Check over there to your right for my public key.

  • Two things I learned on Sunday

    I learned two particular things on Sunday:

    1. Fixing the vinyl in your car is not easy to do well
    2. Wrapping your handlebars, while not complicated, requires practice

    The second of these items is by far the most important to me. While I love my car, it’s getting a bit long in the tooth and my opinion is that these sorts of things are expected (maybe even required!) in a ten and a half year old car.

    Do you like the white? I think next time I’ll go with red.

    Handlebars Rewrapped

  • Roundworm.org

    Re: my last post, I’m very disappointed that no one has done anything interesting with roundworm.org.

    Somebody has purchased it and is willing to sell it, I’m guessing. I’ll be they snapped it up in hopes some medial firm would want it.

  • Why I Despair Sometimes for Technology

    I nearly shot Mozilla Thunderbird with my imaginary ray cannon this morning. This is why.

    I am a hip, with-it, capable-of-adapting, technology person. I am a beneficiary of a middle class American upbringing and a private engineering college education. I have self selected myself into a realm of (moderate) computer skills which assist me in carrying out my daily tasks, including this blog post.

    But sometimes, it feels like banging my head on a wall.

    I remember back in the day of MS-DOS 3.0 when I sat down with a manual and started playing the “what does this command do?” game. That was when I first learned about paths and command line interfaces. Every computer geek that I’ve ever been associated with has at one time or another spent days figuring out how to do something; a lot of learning is packed into that process. Undertaking a daunting computer task is a good way to learn all the ins and outs. I respect this method of learning and do it myself (although less these days) especially now that the web has provided a wealth of resources to help, literally at your finger tips.

    But again, sometimes computer problems are like pulling the nails off those tips.

    Case in point: I have recently switched from POP mail to IMAP mail for all my normal email communications. This allows me to a) access my messages wherever I go rather than having to wait ’til I get home and b) retain easy access to encrypted communications. I’m using Mozilla Thunderbird for various reasons, the trump of which was that it easily allows GnuPG through its extension of Enigmail. All good and simple. As long as you’re familiar with how to set up an email account on a mail program, Thunderbird will give you no issues.

    Unless, for some reason (say) you can’t send mail because Thunderbird insists on using your login ID as “nematode” rather than “nematode@roundworm.org”. It so happens that the “@roundworm.org” is a critical part of the login of your mail server and Thunderbird just won’t send it! You mess with the settings. You delete and reload the account. You pore over the server variables. You delete and reload the account again. You stare at the screen until your eyes bleed. You go three whole fucking weeks without being able to send email from this account.

    Then you notice the little scrolly bar on the left side of the account set up window.

    nematode

    Yes, ladies and gentleman, I agonized for three weeks because I couldn’t figure out that I should scroll down to the bottom where it helpfully says “Outgoing Server (SMTP)”. This is where all those settings I’d been looking for were hiding. This was the root of my despair. Why wasn’t this placed with all the other account settings? Why why why!?

    I’m a bit upset by this, as you can probably tell.

    Technology is a wonderful thing. Good design is also a wonderful thing. Good design isn’t just making things look good (and I praise Thunderbird for having a simple and attractive display), it’s about making things usable, and my wife will probably agree.

    I’ll be forwarding this comment to the Thunderbird developers. While not everyone probably has a horror story like this one, it’s the exceptions that create the largest amounts of grief.

  • Santa!

    For your consideration, I present to you today’s Distressing Childhood Memory.

    The SANTA Project.

    Truly a tough blow to the believers out there.

  • I'm not a Blogger Today

    I’m feeling down-blogged today, so in lieu of a real post, here’s a picture of my cat. I have this image on the wall in my office.

    Psyche

  • Favorite Photo of the Week

    For once, my “Favorite Photo” was not taken by me. (Actually, for twice)

    Ready to Rumble

    I think this is a great picture of Jenn and I, ready to head off on our triathlon. Awesome image.

  • Peachtree City Triathlon 2008 Recap

    Trapped in Seaweed!
    Photo Credit to Schoschie

    Yesterday, Jenn and I participated in the 2008 Peachtree City Triathlon. This was our second running of this race. Overall, it was excellently organized and run1. There were 1,100 racers with all their equipment packed into the park next to the Peachtree City Library at Drake Lake. Due to injury, I did not race the entire race, only the swim and bike legs. I walked the 5k. Jenn turned in an excellent time, especially in the swim where she overcame some major obstacles to set a personal record. We had a good time.

    You might be wondering about the image that is heading up this post. Let’s just say that the lake was a bit weedy. I was pulling lakeweed off of me from the word go. Yuck. Check out this image and this image in my flickr set to see how mucky the lake was.

    Courntey and David came with us to cheer us on and take pictures, thanks guys!

    My splits:
    107/113 in my age group
    840/~940 overall
    11:07 swim (~500 m)
    2:18 T1
    44:26 bike (13.2 miles)
    2:51 T2
    48:18 run (5 km) A personal record! Slowest 5k evah!

    Bill Done with Race (but on to the Run)Obviously not a stellar performance, but I’m happy with it. My leg is doing better and I didn’t hurt myself and throw off my marathon training. The next triathlon on the schedule will be an olympic sometime in the spring. Perhaps right back here in Peachtree City. I’ll be training for Ironman Florida at that time.

    1I have a small beef with the race organizers, which I’ll be sharing with them. The race packet doesn’t include an information booklet. By itself, this is fine; I understand that they are going as green as possible. Eliminating paper is a noble start. But please please please, include the start time of the race in the packet. Yes, I know we can look that up ahead of time, but there’s nothing like picking up your number and chip, getting back to the hotel and then thinking, “Oh my god, what time does the race start? Is it 7:30? I think so, but am I sure. For the sake of my friendship with Jim, who has answered the phone and looked this up twice now, I implore race directors to include this information.