Category Archives: Uncategorized

Moved to Slice

I’ve had a Slice for quite some time now and I’ve *finally* moved this site to it. The last several times I’ve traveled, we’ve had a power outage, and the server hasn’t come back up when the power restored. It’s not a terribly old server, but it seems to be nearing the end of its life, and I’m ready to not be in the ISP business any more. So, farewell, buglet, hello malbec. The days of my running servers in my home are nearing an end.

Avalanche

For the Weekend Wordsmith


Mt. Longonot, 1988
November 25, 2008

It certainly seemed like an avalanche,
the trickle of scree running away
from our boots that had run around the mountain,
and up from the plain, so far below.
Standing here at the edge of that life,
on the cusp of another,
nudging these pebbles down the slope
where they would dislodge so many others
unthought-of and unseen from where
we stood, at the top
of our world, miles ahead
of our friends
who had stopped to enjoy the view.

No Snow Day

No Snow Day

November 22, 2008
IRW

How many “covers the ground like a blanket” poems
must we endure before
May’s rescue from
chilled and many-times-rewarmed similes?

Have you noticed how many little girls
are named April, May, June, Julia?
I’ve even met an Augusta.
But never a February.
Although, what they were thinking
when they named someone April,
I’m not sure.
Does it mean that she’s cold,
and prone to tantrums?

Do they, south of the equator,
name their children November
and January, to remind them
of the sun in the chilling depths
of a Montevideo June?

Better to name her Rhiannon,
that she can run with the wild horses
all the year long.

Or Ray, to warm us
during the bottomless chill
of the seemingly-endless winter.

Ray, who now laments
that it doesn’t, in fact,
cover the ground like a blanket,
and he must go to school.
One flake short of a blizzard,
and he is condemned to sit, wishing
he was outside in the cold snow,
wishing he was inside
in front of a warm fire,

rather than outside in the cold snow,
wishing the opposite.

Car Companies

I keep reading incredibly sane things that seem crazy at first, and I keep wondering, is anybody else reading this stuff other than us nutjob bloggers? I sincerely, deeply, passionately hope that Obama’s apparent passion for the internet isn’t all marketing, and that he’s actually reading what the really smart people are saying about problems that are being made WAAAAAAAY more complicated than they need to be.

There’s nothing particularly American about having all the car making owned by three companies that very clearly don’t have my best interests in mind, and very clearly stifle innovation when it seems that that innovation will limit their ability to buy more private jets.

Yes, it would be dreadful if all those folks lost their jobs, and so I’m rather torn about what’s coming down the pike. But the innovation that could come out of the breakup of this monopoly would be something fabulous to see, wouldn’t it? I’ll betcha Richie could make a better car over the weekend than Detroit has turned out in the last ten years.

Apache Incubator – Stonehenge

There’s a new project in the Apache Incubator. It’s called Stonehenge, and it’s about producing sample applications that implement industry standards. The purpose of these sample applications is to show developers how to develop interoperable applications. There’s a new FeatherCast about it, if you want to learn more about what they’re trying to accomplish.

By entering the ASF, a project has access to the ASF infrastructure, legal organization, funding, conferences, and a variety of other resources, as well as having access to folks who know how to do Open Source, who have been doing it for more than ten years, and are many of them, fabulous mentors for folks wanting to figure out how this all works.

Preying on the innocent

In the day of elaborately designed phishing messages that genuinely appear to be from my bank, it’s almost refreshing to see spam like the following, which is so naive it’s almost endearing:

DEAR : WEBMAIL USER .

YOU ARE RECEIVING THIS EMAIL BECAUSE WE ARE ABOUT TO CARRYOUT SOME MAINTANANCE ON ALL OUR EMAIL CLIENTS ACCOUNT BECAUSE WE HAVE DETECTED SOME TROJAN VIRUSES WHICH IS ABOUT TO SPREAD AND ATTACK ALL OUR EMAIL USERS MAILBOX.
SO AS FOR YOUR ACCOUNT TO REMAIN SAFE, YOU ARE REQUIRED EMAIL US YOUR USERNAME AND PASSWORD TO THIS EMAIL ADDRESS : jenni2nicess@yahoo.com . FOR US TO PROTECT YOUR ACCOUNT FROM BEEN CLOSED AND YOUR MESSAGES IN YOUR MAILBOX WILL STILL BE INTACT .
UPON RECEIPT OF THIS NOTIFICATION , YOU ARE TO RESPOND WITH YOUR USERNAME AND PASSWORD WITHIN THE NEXT 48HRS .

MERRY XMAS IN ADVANCE TO ALL OUR EMAIL CLIENTS .

What’s distressing about it, though, is that there are people out there who are actually stupid (or trusting) enough that they will send their username and password to jenni2nicess.