Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

Back on my birthday, I got a slew of new books. I finished a few.

I read a good book called Crypto by Steven Levy. It the story of how encryption became available to the general public against the wishes of the NSA. It’s an amazing story to read. Without these individuals, we wouldn’t have the secure web connections routinely in use today. It doesn’t tell you how to use or make crypto. For that, you need Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier.

I also read Candle by John Barnes. The book takes place in world exposed in Kaleidoscope Century earlier. The concept of ‘memes’, a type of program that runs in your brain, is explored. The basic concept is that eveyone on earth has the same meme running after a long ‘War of the memes’ for control of people’s minds. Is it better to be happy and a productive member of society at all times, or is free will more important? Candle is not as dark and shocking as Kaleidoscope Century, and doesn’t make you guess as much about the lingo used. I remember reading Kaleidoscope Century and wondering what a ‘werp’ was for a while (it’s a computer/PDA, btw).

On a completely different note, I made jerky. I will post the recipe when I find it. I thought it was on my desk, but it’s not…

Until, you get the Link of the Day.

When cutting the coconut meat from the shell, draw the knife away from you.

If you don’t, you will slide the blade into your wrist, bleed all over the place, and look stupid in front of your in-laws.

Trust me on this one, I know what I’m talking about.

Last night, the virii struck my house.

My wife was greeted with this:

It seems the W32.Sircam.Worm@mm virs had attacked my wife’s computer. Thank goodness, Zonealarm stopped the nastiness.

Even with Norton Anti-Virus, it still took a few hours to ensure that this thing was gone from her computer. While I was working n her computer, my dad called and he too had been infected.

I advise all my loyal readers to update their virus definitions before you suffer a similar fate!

To the writer of the virus: Fuck you! I could have been playing games or watchign DVDs instead of watching computers churn & reboot.

I found Spam Turkey!

Click the Spam Turkey tin to read more.

Yesterday, we took one of my staff, Brian, out to lunch since he is getting married next week. We ate at a nice Italian restaurant, but we ate outside.

Half of the people at the table we under the umbrella’s shade. A couple others and I were under the blazing summer sun. At first it wasn’t oo bad, but soon it was quite sweaty & hot.

For whatever reason, it took forever to get our food and I was melting the entire time. I was forced to go to the Ben & Jerry’s next door for ice cream after the meal for relief.

Well after working on this icon for quite a while I think I finally got it right. In the process I learned a ton about Japanese family crests, called Kamon.

Well, what do your think? Close enough?

I posted a screen capture of my current desktop for forum elsewhere.

I thought you all might want to take a look. Nothing special, but you are so bored, you’ll look at anything.

On a sad note, Webvan is now gone. Kozmo, PD Quick, and now Webvan. What is my lazy ass supposed to do? Drive to the store?

There are many costs to parenthood. Everyone pays a different price.

Yes, those are my golf clubs. I have played so rarely since the kids were born, my clubs literally rusted. They are useless since hitting with them would probably result in them breaking and the end impaling someone.

I guess this is why some guys buy carbon fiber & titanium clubs. No rusting there.

In my office at work I have a linux box. It helped me learn about linux and runs a little Apache web server for me.

It is stable and it shows:

When I put the box together I slapped in a video card but didn’t put in that little screw that keeps the card in place.

Fast forward two years….

I unhook the video cable to attach the monitor to another computer I’m playing with. After I’m done I try to reattach the cable to the video board on the linux box. To my dismay, the card come loose and slides out of it’s slot. No video for me.

I can push the card back in, but no video. The box is still running as you can see from the image above, but no video.

Anyone know how to reinitialize the video card without rebooting the box? I’m running Mandrake 7.2.

Ellis, formerly of geeknews has finally launched his new site.

geeklab.net is up and running. Go and add it as a bookmark.

I know I haven’t been posting much. I’ve been too busy on dalnet in #houseofmovies. Wink wink, nudge nudge.