After wasting an inordinate amount of time, I discovered that Henry Clay high school is not where I thought it was. So, in addition to having to pay to go to a concert I didn’t want to go to, I missed the part of it we were presumably going to see. And Sarah was asleep anyway.
In all, a thoroughly wasted evening.
Bah.
Some day, I will do this. 55-day safari from Nairobi to Cape Town. I remember seeing the folks that were on these trips. They always looked filthy, tired, unkempt, and happy.
I discovered Ken’s List o’ Books today. Like I need anything to add to my list, which isn’t even complete, since I got that 13-volume set of classic literature last year. Sheesh.
I suppose it’s ok to be doomed never to finish my reading list. I suppose that’s better than the alternative, which would be having to read every piece of tripe that makes it onto the New York Times list.
I was really hoping that I could have Sarah’s fish here for her birthday, but after getting it almost close enough for me to go get it, someone took it back another 92 miles further away. That makes it a little far to go get on a weekend. It has travelled more than 5000 miles, and is getting pretty close, but I don’t suppose there’s much way for it to get here in the next 2 weeks.
Each year, for some time now, I have read “A Christmas Carol”, some time near Christmas.
For various reasons, I didn’t read it last year, and I’m reading it now, taking rather more time going through it than I have in the past, noticing things that I have missed before.
In 2002, I wrote that I was more in tune with Scrooge in Stave One than with the final stave. This time through, however, I’m finding Stave Two to resonate with me.
For those not familiar with the book, in Stave One, we have the “bah, humbug” Scrooge, the “out upon Christmas, what good has it ever done me” Scrooge, the Scrooge that sees Christmas as a time when you look back on 12 years of unpaid bills and accrue more bills.
In Stave Two, Scrooge is faced with the regrets of his past – decisions he wished he had not made, and the consequences of those decisions. Stave Two is bittersweet. He sees the joys of his apprenticeship, but realizes that he didn’t learn a lot from it. He sees the joys of his childhood, which he had not thought of for decades. And he sees the missed opportunity to have a beautiful young thing that might have called him Father, and been his joy in the Autumn of his life.
Late last year I read “One more for the road”, a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury. A theme through that book is regrets for life misspent. I found this book to be a shocking contract to “Dandelion Wine”, which is probably my favorite book, and which talks about the joy of youth, the awareness of life, and the wonder of being young enough to feel immortal, but old enough to know that you’re not.
Dickens captures this sentiment in Scrooge peering in the window at the children that will never be his, as he thinks “I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest license of a child, and yet been man enough to know its value.”
Stave Two is joyful, and yet deeply sad. It revels in the past, and yet mourns the passage of the past, and, with it, the chance to change the future. And even though you know Stave Five is coming, there’s still a sense of mourning here which cannot be simply brushed off. Because even though Scrooge redeems himself, he still cannot recover opportunities lost.
“A Christmas Carol” is a deeply moving book, and the many many people who have experienced the story solely through the various movies adapted from the book are missing the larger part of the impact of the story. And it is Stave Two, more than any other, which moves me almost to tears every time I read it.
If you haven’t read the book – I mean, really read the entire thing – you should do so. It’s a lot more than Scrooge McDuck throwing Daisy out for not paying her mortgage, and then giving a teddy bear to Tiny Tim.
A while back, I posted something about the Time Cube folks. For some reason, there’s been some discussion there, between one of the Time Cube fanatics and some other guy. It’s interesting reading.
What’s fascinating about this stuff is that, if you really read it, they’re not saying anything even remotely original. They’re saying, if I understand it, that at any given time, it’s noon somewhere, midnight somewhere, sunrise somewhere, and sunset somewhere. Well, yeah, we’ve known that for several centuries, at the very least.
But, by phrasing things in confusing circular sentences, they make it appear either more elevated, or more insane, depending on your perspective.
Take this sentence, for example:
If you had not been educated stupid, you would recognise that the Earth rotates between the opposite parameters of North and South poles.
OK, so what are they saying here? That the earth rotates, pivoted at the north and south pole. Yeah. Every first grader knows that. But, by phrasing it as they have, they are intentionally causing you to react negatively to it. Why? I can’t imagine.
The vast majority of their points are like this. They say obvious things, and then claim that the whole world disagrees with them. Fascinating reading, really. What we seem to have here is a scientist with no original ideas, but with an irrational feeling that the whole world is against him.
And, if his presentation ever lacks clarity, it’s because words themselves are evil and stupid. This works both ways, too. If you to happen to understand what he’s saying, then you really didn’t understand, because you are evil and stupid. This permits him to evade having to explain anything, and it evades anyone discovering that he’s not really saying anything profound.
Couching the entire debate in terms of everyone being STUPID AND EVIL, and putting everything ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS, they manage to elevate a few trite statements to the realm of religious warfare. You know, it really makes me wonder if this guy isn’t just a psychologist doing an elaborate experiment.
Nah, he’s probably just a looney.
As I am being innundated by the latest Windows virus, I wonder, yet again, who is to blame for this nonsense.
This particular virus does not take advantage of any Microsoft vulnerability, but, instead, relies on the user to save the attachment, and then run it.
I find myself leaning towards Ron’s take on this. He’s right, I suppose. The user shouldn’t have to know this sort of stuff.
Mail server admins, on the other hand, should know about this stuff. If, for example, your mail server has in place the very basic precaution of dropping Windows binary attachments, you’ll drop a significant percentage of this particular virus.
As per my earlier note, just adding a line to drop .zip attachments will get the rest of it.
It also requires a bit of vigilance. I noticed that my mail server was suffering under some additional load, and investigated why that was the case. And then I took action. With the ENORMOUS volume of these messages that I’m seeing, apparently a lot of mail admins didn’t do that.
I’m seeing about 2 of these a second now. So 7200 an hour. And I usually process about 2000 messages a day.
The following should go into mime_header_checks.regexp assuming you’re running Postfix. Which you should be.
/filename=”?body.zip”/ DISCARD Virus spam discarded (W32.Novarg.A@mm)
No point REJECTing it, since you’d just be sending it back to an already-infected victim.
=========================
*update*
OK, it turns out that the filename varies. For the moment, I’m dropping everything with a .zip attachment. I’ve gotten a HUGE surge in inbound email in the last 2 or 3 hours, MOST of it consisting of this virus message, and almost all of it is coming from two addresses: 63.164.145.33 and 63.164.145.161 I don’t know who this is, but they are making dozens of connections per second to deliver mail. Or at least, they were, until I told the firewall about them.
I hope they stop soon.
Yesterday I bought Kevin Hemenway’s book “Spidering Hacks”. It seems, at first glance, to be an amazingly useful book. While I don’t expect that there’s much in here that I could not figure out on my own, with time and motivation, I think that the book provides a box of tools that will save me an enormous amount of those two precious comodoties.
And, I should note, the acknowledgements of the book speak of me lovingly, and I just could not resist:
… to Rich and Ken for being my scapegoats (“well, hey, at least I’m not that late”) …
heh, heh
Morbus++
While messing with photos, I needed a simple way to rotate an image that didn’t involve loading up Gimp or Paint Shop, or whatever. Here it is.
What I don’t get is that it segfaults every time I run it. However, the image is always created correctly. Any tips would be welcome. Meanwhile, I’m rotating images with less pain.
Usage: rotateimage img deg where img is the path to the image, and deg is the number of degrees through which you want to rotate it, with the default being 90 counterclockwise.
#!/usr/bin/perl use Image::Magick; my $image = Image::Magick->new; my $deg = $ARGV[1] || 90; print "Reading $ARGV[0]n"; open (IMAGE, $ARGV[0]); $image->Read(file=>*IMAGE); close(IMAGE); $image->Rotate($deg); $filename = $ARGV[0]; $filename =~ s/(.*).(.*)$/$1.new.$2/; print "Writing $filenamen"; open(IMAGE, ">$filename"); $image->Write(file=>*IMAGE, $filename=>$filename); close(IMAGE);