HAI
I HAS A VAR ITZ 1
IM IN YR LOOP
VISIBLE VAR
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 39 O RLY?
YA RLY
GTFO
NO WAI
UP VAR!!1
KTHX
KTHX
KTHXBYE
(From here. Lolcode specs here.)
Hmm, the code tag is malfunctioning. If it’s all left-justified to you, please pretend it’s properly indented.
Some observations:
We are going to the woods on the weekend. No cell, no wireless, no anything but loons and wind and probably a few determined mosquitos.
We have hot chocolate, marshmallows, and those fabulous Wolf Blass Bilyara Reserve unbreakable bottles of wine; a rental canoe which is Not My Problem, a five-year-old eager to paddle, and two excellent campsites.
Aaaaah…
CBC:
Mounties in eastern Manitoba have nabbed a strange, hairy monster that has been stalking campgrounds in and around the Whiteshell Provincial Park for the past two summers.
…
… the man was not intoxicated when nabbed by officers; he apparently had been camping in the area over the past two summers and simply enjoyed the prank.
His victims were less impressed. The woman who complained gave the man quite a tongue-lashing, Reitlo said.
“He was pretty meek and mild at the end of it … he definitely learned his lesson, that’s for sure.”
No charges have been laid.
OK, things are always scarier in the dark, but honestly — have these people no sense of humour? I’m sure I would’ve freaked out a bit if a gorilla-masked guy wandered through my campsite, but I like to think I’d laugh after the reveal. At least they didn’t lay charges.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I had some acquaintances who were very good at doing special-effects makeup. (If they read this and I get something very wrong, they should feel free to add corrections in the comments [or to fabricate stuff if it makes the story better.])
One afternoon they’d done a particularly impressive and dramatic chest wound thing on one of them — practice for a film shoot or for Halloween or something, or maybe just for fun, I don’t recall. When it was done, it seemed a shame to waste such a fine chest wound. I mean: what good is a fabulous chest wound unless people get to see it?
They piled into a car and drove around a bit. They passed a park, the sort which is more-or-less surrounded by streets and houses. Aha, opportunity! The car slowed and one of the guys pushed the chest-wound guy out of the car and onto the grass. After rolling (or bouncing, or whatever) to a stop, Chest-Wound Guy got up and staggered around the park clutching at his chest and showing off the chest wound to great effect. Apparently it was convincing — the police got six calls.
Sadly, the attending officer was humour-impaired, and mischief charges were laid.
IIRC it ended happily, in front of a judge who did have a sense of humour and threw out the charges.
I hope Sasquatch Boy decides he hasn’t “learned his lesson” after all. Or I hope the lesson he learned was “next time, toss the incriminating mask in the woods and don’t ‘fess up so quickly”. Society should have a high tolerance for good pranks, IMO.
A nice passage from the middle of a long (and recommended) Boxes and Arrows post:
A good password is one that cannot be guessed. And there within lies the problem. What is difficult to guess is most likely difficult to remember. This problem is multiplied when you have many applications that require authentication, each with its own password policy that dictates password complexity and mandatory resetting. So while a hacker may not be able to guess your passwords, you most likely will not be able to remember them either. So what do you do? Do what everyone else does (but knows they shouldn’t) – write your passwords down on the small piece of paper in your desk drawer. Not exactly the most secure practice.
The problem here is that the security folks design their password policies in a theoretical world where they only consider computers and hackers. Make the passwords very strong. But the primary end users, the people who actually log in appropriately, are not considered. The ultimate result is systems that are less secure. People are people. Defining password policies without considering the complete human context in which they are applied results in lower security.
At work, I have to come up with a new strong password every month. Until they put in that system, I had an excellent, very strong password that had never been written down or told to anyone. Now, because I have to remember a new password and change it again every 30 days, I have a very simple formula for each password. It meets the rules for strength but only by the letter of the law and not its spirit: it’s pretty weak. If it wasn’t simple, I’d have to write it down.
Boxes and Arrows proposes that IT departments promote the use of password management programs, which is a sensible enough solution and one I’d support in a workplace setting. (I’d support it within IT departments too. How many firewall/router/wireless etc installs have you seen with admin settings that haven’t even been changed from the defaults?)
I think many us can get away with a much simpler solution: not changing passwords*. The stuff on my servers and websites is pretty tame stuff — no nuclear secrets there, no plans for world domination**, nothing that might reveal Bourne’s true identity. If someone hacks my stuff, it’ll be a plain old vandal, not someone who’ll snoop in time and time again to read and steal things with Top Secret stamps on them. If I’m hacked they’ll be the boring kind of hackers, the kind that are just out to break stuff and make a mess, and it’ll be obvious. Given that, what’s the point in preemptively changing passwords? If I don’t write it down and I don’t tell anyone, my strong password remains just as strong as it was when I created it.
Odds are low anyone will bother to get past a decently-administered firewall. A good firewall is like a good bike lock: it won’t keep out someone determined to get you (edit: or someone who really likes a challenge), but if they’re not after you personally, they’ll probably move on to an easier target.
This stuff makes me crazy. More complication is not always better.
–
* This assumes there are proper backups. Leaving passwords unchanged is a level of potential foolishness I can accept. Failing to back up adequately is foolishness on a totally different scale.
** Those stay safely in my head 
Wide-eyed children of the eighties watched in astonishment as Michael J. Fox (a.k.a. Marty McFly) shredded pavement on a hovering skateboard in Back to the Future Part II. The hoverboard was just like a skateboard, but with one crucial difference: no wheels. His pink and teal board had “magnetic” pads on the bottom and with a quick push-off could silently cruise over grass, pavement, and even water. While this highly desirable piece of movie technology seems very plausible, it crushingly remains fiction. I think I speak for all of us when I say, “Thank you for breaking my heart, Michael J. Fox.”
Where’s My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future That Never Arrived
by Daniel H. Wilson
Ah, how often I’ve shouted that exact phrase. It’s the 21st century, for heaven’s sake, now WHERE IS MY JETPACK, why does my house lack a transporter room, and when do I get my robot maid? Good grief — Firefox is even flagging “jetpack” as an unknown word. This isn’t the 21st century I signed up for!
Daniel Wilson understands this frustration. (So does my husband, who saw this book and bought it for me, and who now must put up with me reading the funny bits out loud.) The book examines, with decent science and great humour, just what’s up with all this great stuff they promised us: whether it exists; if not, why not; and if so, where and how you can get your hands on it.
Though fiery explosions brought on the demise of commercial airships, a simple fact remains: Someday, the fate of the free world may rest solely upon your ability to pilot a stolen Nazi zeppelin.
Yes, Daniel Wilson understands what this is all about.
Wherever a dangerous new technology exists, there is a guy with cool goggles and streaky blond hair waiting to shatter his fibula. Totally.
(All quotes from the book.)
(A found poem, comprising titles from my spam)
I.
A certain tenseness could be sensed in the atmosphere of the household
I have read your treatise–a very useful work, but stupid
The man from the centre realised that he couldn’t draw blood there either, so he went back to the subject of the tung
So I stood upright, protecting my head and neck with my arms and hands as well as with the cloak
It is for the promise of the solution
Load bearing fruit cake
II.
You have new mail from Natalia, 25, Russia, dating
The woman’s face changed before his eyes
Thoughts of reprisals fill her mind.
Why be an average guy any longer
But maybe it could never be the same, I told myself
Sorry, man. I have to go
These pictures are going to be too big for the blog template, but oh well. You can’t see the detail if they’re any smaller.
I’d never thought much about what lentils look like when they’re growing. Turns out they look something like this when they’re just about ready to harvest — they’re inside the small flat pods:
Yellow peas, the kind that end up dried and in split pea soup, look like this:
And canola looks like this:
From a distance, a whole field of canola looks sort of feathery and delicate. It’s tough stuff, though, not much bothered by an energetic five-year-old running through it:
