Parking Lot

 Family  No Responses »
Jun 072004
 

We visited Dallas this weekend for both my father’s 61st birthday and my 15 year high school reunion. The return trip was a nightmare due to some sort of major accident on I-35 just south of Hillsboro. We were at a complete standstill for an hour and could see the Lifeflight helicopter land and take off from the highway in front of us, but we were too far back to see how many cars were involved or the extent of the damage. I got out the camera and took shots of the traffic behind and in front of us (~600k each).

 Posted by on June 7, 2004 at 7:16 am

Time off

 Family  No Responses »
Jun 042004
 

My brother-in-law spent Memorial Day weekend with us. We took him to Cooper’s on Monday. There’re a few pictures in the Moblog to commemorate the occasion. It was gut-bustingly good as usual. Later that night, The Wife and I went to see A Perfect Circle at the Erwin Center with a few friends. They were really good, although they didn’t deviate much from the two albums of material. I think they only neglected to play two songs off of Mer de Noms and everything off of The Thirteenth Step. Maynard took the opportunity to bash both Schwarzenegger and Bush along with Clear Channel.

I finally took advantage of one of Best Buy’s ridiculous two years – no interest sales and bought a home theater package. It’s a Yamaha receiver with Klipsch speakers. I’ve been delayed in hooking it up as The Wife took mounting surround speakers on the wall as an excuse to re-paint our den. We successfully completed that yesterday, so I should have everything hooked up this weekend. I can’t wait. While buying hardware to mount the speakers, we also got a ceiling fan for The La’s room. It’s supposed to be installed next week. Now all I have to do is get some drywall and seal over the opening for our house fan which we almost never use. It just sucks the A.C. from the house into the attic which is like a furnace this time of year. Anybody have any good dry-walling tips? This’ll be my first attempt on my own. It doesn’t seem all that difficult.

I finally got around to updating the pictures of the week with a few shots from a trip to Pease Park in mid-May.

 Posted by on June 4, 2004 at 11:36 pm

Here we go again

 Blog  No Responses »
May 252004
 

I guess it’s time to move away from phpNuke or at least make sure that I don’t get too far behind on the versions. Some of you may have noticed the banner this morning, but I got hacked last night.

The pinhead who did it got admin access to the phpNuke system, but I don’t think they got access to my hosting account. I’ve saved off the access logs and the entire database at the time of the hack, so I’ve got their IP address and the exploit that they used. I’ve patched the hole.

As with the person who hacked me a couple of years ago, I’m coming after the ones who did this. I got the last person’s site taken down and also tracked them back to the university computer lab that they used. I’ll be doing the same thing to the pigfucker who did this.

What is it with Albanians and hacking phpNuke sites via well-known security holes? It doesn’t take any imagination and you’re certainly not gaining notariety attacking a site that’s read by all of 10 people. Sigh.

EDIT (4:10PM): I’ve sent e-mails to TheGenius’s [sic] web hosting company, Lycos Europe, and the owner of the IP address from which he hacked my site, South Eastern European University. With any luck, my friend’s site from which he boasted about his hacks will be taken down shortly. In fact, I already don’t seem to be able to access it. Wow, that was fast. Lycos is definitely on the ball.

EDIT (05.26.2004): I spoke too soon. It’s still there. That did seem a little too fast.

 Posted by on May 25, 2004 at 7:16 pm

Quite a day

 Politics  No Responses »
May 182004
 

Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education and the first day that same-sex marriages were legal in Massachussetts. I hate to resort to clichés, but this picture will save me 1,000 words.

 Posted by on May 18, 2004 at 7:59 pm

Bruce Sterling at Bookpeople

 Austin  No Responses »
May 182004
 

I went to Bruce Sterling’s reading for The Zenith Angle last night at Bookpeople. I haven’t been to very many book signings, but it was a modest turnout, definitely smaller than the Neal Stephenson signing last October. Sterling is in the middle of his largest book tour ever and seemed relieved to be back on his home turf for a day. He even commented that he decided to wear some old sandals as opposed to socks and shoes, something he wouldn’t normally do at a signing in another city.

He started off talking about his annual SXSW party which has apparently grown to such a proportion that he’s vexed as to whether or not to continue the tradition. He’s convinced that cell phones and text messaging were a contributing factor to the size of the party this year. He used the story of the party to tie into a brief commentary on on globalization and then also related it to his new book. I managed to read the preface while waiting and he read the first chapter aloud. I found his reading style a little odd. His delivery was enthusiastic and endearingly geeky. There were certain passages where he clearly looked up and paused briefly, expecting laughter from the audience.

While I’ve read many of his articles in various magazines, the only book I’ve read is his collaboration with William Gibson, The Difference Engine, which I didn’t particularly care for. So far, the new one seems like it’ll be a fast read. It’s set in the recent past with the first chapter occurring on 9/11 and looks like it’ll be part thriller and part commentary on recent events. He mentioned during that signing that he’s currently working on a book set fifty years into the future.

 Posted by on May 18, 2004 at 6:53 pm

Compassionate conservative

 Politics  No Responses »
May 172004
 

It’s a good thing there are college students out there with plenty of time to find and point out cool stuff. The latest is an LA Times article (registration required) which points to a particular section of GW’s website. Do yourself a favor and open each of these in a separate browser window and Alt-Tab back and forth (I’m not sure what you Mac and Linux people have to do, which certainly loses me geek points somewhere).

 Posted by on May 17, 2004 at 7:11 pm
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