Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

The girls have terms for the types of days. There are school days and home days. They don’t say vacation day, holiday, or weekend. They say home day.
I’m having a home day today while the rest of you wrestle with last minute work issues before the weekend. Muah-ha-ha-ha.
In a previous post, Dee asked in the comments about Burger King tacos. She suggested that BK tacos were going away. The Horror!
I called the local Burger King and they assured me that the tacos were here to stay. Still a bit concerned, I called the Burger King Customer Support line (305) 378-3535 to find out the truth.
I spoke to Nicky at Burger King and she said that there was talk of stopping the sale of tacos at some stores. She said that there were no specifics, but that she could confirm that in some locations, the tacos may be stopping.
I may have to organize a protest. Let me ponder…
On the political tip:
Trent Lott is resigning as Senate Leader. Thank you, thank you. I take full credit for this thanks to my fabulous ‘send him a pen‘ idea.
OK, enough weblogging, I’m off to have fun.

I went shopping last night for gifts. On a Wednesday night, Best Buy was quite crowded… I had a list of what I was looking for, otherwise I would have been sucked into the aisle after aisle of DVDs, games, and other cool stuff.
My father-in-law was along for the trip and he was dsitracted by the plethora of techno-goodness.
We stopped by Zany Brainy to pick up stuff for the girls and got a ton of good stuff. Itold my father-in-law that Michele woudl not approve of my choices. He didn’t believe me. So we bet a dollar on it. Of course, Michele disagreed with the majority of my choices and I won the dollar.
For some strange reason, I am still looking to buy GMRS radios. I need to choose between the Motorola and the Uniden options. Any suggestions?

Okie, dokies. I feel asleep early yesterday night. This resulted in a serious lack of websurfing and nazi-killing….
In a comments thread below, BillB requested the direct link to the Firefly cancellation news. Here’s the news from the director Tim Minear. Here’s the news from Entertainment Weekly.
My brother Matt did a cool new flash animation for his work. Check it out. Matt’s skills are impressive.
Over on Anita’s weblog, I found a link to a test to see if you are a PHB (Pointy Headed Boss). Hopefully I fail the test. I think the writer of the test is Anita’s husband.
Mister P’s fun with his automobile continues. If ever there was a man that needed a wife to straighten him out, it is Mister P.
I was reading about the Creative Commons site today. I’m not sure I understand it fully, but I’m sure someone will explain it to me. From what my cursory glance reveals, it’s a method to declare rights to your works in varying levels of control over what people can do with the content. Traditional copyrights are pretty black and white in what people are allowed to do. The Creative Commons people appear to offer shades of grey.
Best. Casemod. Evar.
That’s enough for now. I need some sleep.

The holiday is approaching at light speed. My daughters are quite excited. They already had the fun of Hanukah and now they get to enjoy Christmas.
We decorated the tree yesterday. Much fun was had and we had the traditional ‘how do we put lights on the tree’ arguement.

Left is the trimmed tree. Right is the tree without the harsh flash of the camera.

A while ago I posted about #houseofmovies on dalnet. As a result, people often emailed me asking the same question. What is the song in the beginning of the movies. I didn’t know. It’s interesting music, but not a mainstream tune.
Today I was in the kitchen and I heard the song come out of the computer. I was streaming off of a shoutcast server. I looked down and saw the name of the tune. Breakdown by Tantric.
Most of you regular readers won’t care, but once google vacuums the site, this answer will be available to those that search for it.

I’m sitting on the couch in the living room. The Christmas tree is here with me, unadorned.
After putting the kids to sleep, I caught the second half of Ocean’s Eleven. Then I caught the last 20 minutes of LotR. Now, Apocalypse Now Redux is on. It’s the final scenes when Willard is with Kurtz in the camp.
It will be over soon. If Last Temptation of Christ is on next, I’ll get no sleep tonight.
No links tonight. I did a geocache today, but I haven’t written up the story yet.

I’ve decided to Help Trent Lott Resign.
I’m sending him a pen so he can sign his resignation.
Read the page and see if you want help as well.
Spread the word. Spread the idea far and wide via weblog, email, and carrier pigeon.

We picked up a Christmas Tree tonight. I washed it down and it’s outside drying off for tomorrow’s decoration.
I’ve finally posted the wish list for Michele & myself. I assume you voyeurs want to check it out.
Firefly was cancelled by Fox. This completely sucks. There’s a glimmer of hope at fireflysupport.com but the chances are slim. I told you all to watch the show.
I would have paid large amounts of cash to be in the back seat for this encounter.
Ethan has completely reworked his web page. Looks way cooler than mine now. Please post a comment. He feels unloved.
And a hearty welcome to Dean as he begins his weblog experience. The site still has that new car smell.

No energy for a long entry.
The guys at Penny Arcade agree with me, Equilibrium is worth seeing. Check out the comic as well. Go see the movie, tell you friends to go see the movie.

I got this in my email today about a PNG vulnerability:

Twas the night before Christmas, and deep in IE
A creature was stirring, a vulnerability
MS02-066 was posted on the website with care
In hopes that Team eEye would not see it there
But the engineers weren’t nestled all snug in their beds,
No, PNG images danced in their heads
And Riley at his computer, with Drew’s and my backing
Had just settled down for a little PNG cracking
When rendering an image, we saw IE shatter
And with just a glance we knew what was the matter
Away into SoftICE we flew in a flash
Tore open the core dumps, and threw RFC 1951 in the trash
The bug in the thick of the poorly-written code
Caused an AV exception when the image tried to load
Then what in our wondering eyes should we see
But our data overwriting all of heap memory
With heap management structures all hijacked so quick
We knew in a moment we could exploit this $#!%
More rapid than eagles our malicious pic came —
The hardest part of this exploit was choosing its name
Derek Soeder
Software Engineer
eEye Digital Security

Who says hackers don’t know literature?