Who ordered the scrambled brains?

The title pretty much says it all. After “losing” 5 lbs, (and another one yesterday) I put on my belt this morning and to my surprise it closed one belt-hole tighter, with room! Wow! My endurance had also increased yesterday, and I was able to complete 2.25 miles in 23 minutes without rest. That’s about 6.35mph. ALSO, I have tons of energy this morning. But that might be due to adrenaline leaking out of holes burned into my adrenal glands by all the Coachella molecules in my system.

New feature on the SB called “Now that’s what I call annoying!” Like “Now that’s what I call music” but much improved. It’s a phrase I hear myself saying all the time, and now you will be saying it too (that is if you read my posts out loud as you should be reading them). Yeah, it’s a thin veil for my whining, something I’m sure many of you coinidentally find annoying to read. But… it’s a veil nonetheless. I’m a little hesitant because it might end up being equivalent to the Mike’s Morsels category, as I may be inclined to offer my suggestion each time for dealing with the annoyance. But I wanna take that risk, live on the absolute bleeding edge of life and information, and leave it up to chaos theory/fate/predestination to see where it goes. You could say this feature has a life of it’s own now, to which I can only reply that I hope it lives it honorably.

(This actually brings about a new mini-feature. You’ll notice I used the phrase “the SB” to refer to Who Ordered the Scrambled Brains? That’s it. The new mini-feature is just the introduction of “the SB” into the vernacular. It’s a simple marketing/branding tactic that is sure to make your many conversations about the SB amongst your peers, cronies and henchmen, more succinct and enjoyable.)

On with the show!

You ever leave your computer on overnight with files open and what not, and come back in the morning to see that you have been logged out? Happened to me this morning, and the culprit in my case was Windows’ Automatic Update feature. It caused my computer to reboot this morning at about 3:00am, which is when I have it scheduled to install updates. Allegedly it did display at 5 minute warning that the machine would be rebooted, but I was sleeping 3 miles away at the time. What kind of operating system requires rebooting to update itself? Ok, well, if they were kernel changes then that’s acceptable. So this is the thing, if you have Windows configured to automatically download and install updates, Windows will reboot the machine whenever a “critical” update comes down the shoot. Critically insane, if you ask me. Luckily I had saved all my changes, but what if I hadn’t? What would have happened to all my unsaved changes? They’d be gone! That’s right, gone! Now that’s what I call annoying!

Mike’s Morsel: Configure Windows to download and notify you of the update, but not actually install it for you. That way you have control over the required reboots.

Ok, some thoughts real quick on working out. For those that don’t know, I joined Bally’s a couple weeks ago. I went twice the first week then took a week off ’cause I was sick (such annoying timing!). Last time I went, on the 15th of April (10 days ago) I weighed out at 163lbs, which is consistent with what I weighed a couple days prior to that as well as what I weighed back in December. Ouch. That’s pretty bad considering my freshman year of college I weighed 135lbs., and about a year and a half ago I weighed 145lbs. Well today I weighed out at 158lbs! Granted, weight fluctuates a lot with daily food intake, but wow! It really works! Just like on the commercials! Now that is motivation for me to get back in there and work even harder!

Today’s stats: 247 calories, 2.3 miles, 23 minutes, 182bpm before cool down, which is 93% of my estimated maximum heart rate, meaning that was a very intense work out.

I got to thinking what else motivates me, ’cause when you’re 3/4 the way done with your workout you need something to push you. Of course there’s music. Finding the beat and drawing from it can really keep you going. But that’s unreliable ’cause if you don’t carefully plan your playlist because a lackadaisical song can have the opposite effect, draining you of your stride. A recurring thought while I was running was, “Be perfect.” And of course that’s naive, but it was simple enough while I was running to keep coming back to for motivation. But I think the truth upon which that thought is based is the notion that for whatever goal I adopt, I should not only take every opportunity that arises to fulfill that goal, but I should do so 100%. There are only so many hours in the day, so time usage is what self-improvement depends on. (So “Be perfect” was more a statement of “perfect” execution than elitism or superiority.) I have quite a number of these goals right now, including those that aim to free myself from vices and those that aim merely to enrich myself. Hopefully I’ll blog about those soon.

Real quick, however, one such vice is my diet. It’s atrocious. It’s so much harder for me to restrain myself from going to campus eatery Luvalle Commons to get the grease-dripping breakfast sandwich and tater tots than it is for me to go to the gym and burn 250 calories in 25 minutes. Amazing! What gives?!

Hopefully I’ll also start development on my social health tracking website. Hehe. Had to throw “social” in there to make it Web 2.0.

Coachella this weekend! I’m ready to beat the heat with my new straw cowboy hat hahahaha — I’m not joking. Now I’m off to watch my good friend Vince (significant other of Sonia mentioned recently) in a club roller-hockey match, and then go out to the Little Cave in Highland Park to celebrate his 25th birthday (the last stop on the April birthday bus).

A couple blurbs for you.

Happy Birthday, Natalie!

Yes the birthday locomotive continues it’s long trek through April. “Choo choo! Chugga chugga, chugga chugga!” We all know that Natalie is my corazon, my muse, my special girl, and so on, so if you don’t want to upset me and my homicidal army of recycled, reawakened broken-down thrown-away old, forgotten collection of 386s, 486s, Power PCs, and the like, you best make like an ex-sausage factory worker and wish her a happy birthday, fer Chrissake! We’ve got big big plans for the day, beginning with Christopher Riley playing Elliott Smith at the Getty Center (rich snobs), wining and dining at El Conquistador in Silverlake (poor snobs), and then whatever happens to tickle the fancy of our discerning urban nightlife sensibilities (hobnobs). Like Traintown at Griffith Park or dropping water ballons on the heads of unsuspecting cholos. It’s gon be GREAT!

Pumpkins Redux

Yes, it’s finally happened. We can all grow old, fat, lazy and die now. The Smashing Pumpkins have reunited.

Of course that probably just means Corgan and Chamberlain are gonna be pumping the jam with other ex-grunge rockers. But it’s still big news. They were one of my favorite bands in days of yore, right up there with Yanni and my CD of Gregorian chants. But the C+C (Corgan and Chamby) music factory is gonna need more than their 90s grunge chops to compete with today’s music powerhouses. Are they gonna go contemporary and emphasize the synthetic elements of their sound to try to elbow The Faint out of the indie-dance-goth-rock scene? Are they gonna go Madonna-style and bring in William Orbit for production to obscure their wrinkling wrinkles? Or are they gonna pick up where Kelly Clarkson and the Matrix left off for some hard-hitting Avril Lavigne imitations? Maybe they’ll roll with some phat hooks, spit mad rhymes like lyrical spooks, uncreative music makers juke the the big record dukes, forgot the lessons from their music books, just one listen and then you’ll puke, frontin like the weather, stealin’ the sun like crooks, unstoppable like an army of wook…ies, who got the bees knees, in alternate realities, furry-legged dancing machines ruling over the galaxies… You know lyrics a la MF Doom, dropped onto a Dan the Automator-tracked sampling smorgasborg. Maybe they’ll round out the group with James Blunt or Michael Buble or Josh Groban and update that “Tonight, Tonight” ballad flavor. Or maybe they’ll just be lazy and round up an all-star ensemble of American Idol rejects and take the A Train to Sugar Hill in Harlem. I’m not sure which it will be, but I’m willing to bet my bottom dollar it’s one of those.

Geek walks into a bar…

Small example of why I get along with my co-workers. Emphasis added.

On 4/20/06 2:28pm Mike wrote:

Bruce, I thought you might be interested to see this. It’s the HTTP-level Ajax message that is sent by your Gradebook application. Extremely efficient.

POST /[omitted].ashx HTTP/1.1
Host: cis.ucla.edu
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.2) Gecko/20060308 Firefox/1.5.0.2
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,
text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: close
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Ajax-method: [omitted]
Content-Length: 81
Cookie: edu.ucla.isis4.loginType=B; SITESERVER=ID=5f97f28ba060ce489d9fc2a5845d3f11; DESKTOP=bg=&org=100; ASP.NET_SessionId=lqxvdo55x3ytrmqsjyc5pgzm
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache

{"studentUID": "000000000", "newGrade": "U", "srs": "000000000", "term": "06S"}

It’s funny, the payload in these Ajax HTTP messages isn’t even XML-formatted!

(Wow, that sounds like the punchline to a joke only a geek could tell. So maybe “funny” isn’t the right word, but it is interesting! Hehe.)

On 4/21/06 9:13am Bruce honorably replies:

Actually, that did surprise me. I was kind of expecting that this would be in a SOAP wrapper. It’d be interesting to see how it’s passing some objects, like I’m now doing with webmail, rather than simple strings.

I can actually visualize that, a geek comedy club, with some coarse woman up on stage saying, “And to top it all off, when I got his payload, it wasn’t even XML-formatted!”. The crowd snickers, while a few pimply geeks quietly ask themselves “Gee — I wonder if mine is XML-formatted?”.

When I was in 1st grade, this stupid idiot 5th grader used to taunt me with this chant:

Michael, Michael, motorcycle,
Turn on the key, and watch him pee!

Oh yeah, you’ve got yourself a real classic there, Whitman. Aside from the nonsense rhyming associations and inexcusable grammar, what was a 5th grader doing taunting a 1st grader? I never understood the concept of bullying across vast age ranges. But that didn’t stop me from turning that concept on it’s head. I told my dad about what went down and he applied his learned intellect to craft this little gem:

Dirk, Dirk, what a jerk!
Bought a car that wouldn’t work!

Hahahah, so true, so true! Aside from the fact that a 41-year old was now taunting a 10-year old, boy oh boy was that sweet revenge! When I belted that one out, the entire schoolyard was in hysterics, laughing in that poor sap’s stupid face!

“That moron spent money on an automobile… that doesn’t even turn on!”

“Who now?”

“The ugly fellow over there, getting the crap beat out of him by Mike!”

“Oh, Dirk! Wow, what a loser! His repuation is forever tarnished. He won’t be managing my finances any time soon, let me tell you. I’m gonna go give Mike a hand!”

“Yeah, count me in! These fists miss the feeling of being pounded against the face of a moron!”

Hahaha! Still brings a smile to my face to this day. Come to think of it, Michael “Motorcycle”… I kind of like that. It has a nice ring to it, wouldn’t you say? “The name’s Michael, Michael Motorcycle. Pleased to meet you, Mr. President.”

[Extended version of the above skit with surprise ending.

“What’s that, Cowboy? You calling me old? I’m only 42. I’ve been a bopper since 1974 and I can still bop with the best of them!”]

Ok, I had some frustrating trouble with my computer today so I’m gonna post my resolution here so it can go into Google.

I was setting up Fedora Core 5 on a Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 virtual machine. I used most of the default installation settings, including the ‘Enforcing’ policy set in SELinux. After getting past the virtual display adapter color depth limitation, and setting the background to a solid color (dramatically improving latency), I set out to enable Samba. Should be easy with Red Hat’s configuration tools, right? Wrong. After stumbling around a bit (not used to GUI configuration tools in FOSS OS’), I found this Samba/Fedora guide which provided basic guidance, although I didn’t need to add specific shares because Fedora’s default Samba configuration enables home directory sharing (with an unexpected caveat as you’ll see). When I tried to connect from Windows, however, I recieved “The network path was not found.” So I tried using smbclient from the Samba host itself and got NT_STATUS_BAD_NETWORK_NAME. Grrr. The log displayed:

[2006/04/18 16:45:33, 0] smbd/service.c:make_connection_snum(663)
'/home/mike' does not exist or permission denied when connecting to [mike] Error was Permission denied

That really chapped my hide. The permissions on /home/mike were 700 and ownership was mike:mike. ‘testparm‘ ran without a hitch. ‘smbclient -L localhost‘ returned expected results as well. Finally, after quite a bit of fruitless Google foraging, I thought back to SELinux. I knew that it was a comprehensive security infrastructure, but I had never used it in the past. From the graphical desktop, I navigated to the SELinux configuration tool from the desktop menu bar, System, Administration, Security Level and Firewall, SELinux tab. Then I expanded Modify SELinux Policy, Samba, and found my pot of gold. I put a check in “Allow Samba to share users home directory” and then I was in business. And now, hopefully you are too.

Next steps, XDMCP access and subversion hosting.

They all mocked me and asked me to take it somewhere else. The called it “cyber-babble” and called me lewd names! They accused me of libel!

But now we see my ranting and raving was justified!

There’s an interesting discussion and article on Slashdot about using the Internet to host your contact information, making a web address essentially synonymous with your name. And they too bring up the issue of namespace-collisions. See for yourself. And just you wait, in 10 years we’ll be referring to each other by electronically-palatable pseudonyms. Ay caramba!

OK, are you ready? In order to faciliate more posts I’m creating a new feature called “In Brief”. No, that doesn’t refer to the treasures I find “in my briefs” the morning after a night of Pedro Pepper’s firehouse chili con carne special. This feature will consist of a quagmire of quick quips, quintissential questions, and quazy quandaries from my recent experiences. Lower quality means higher quantity.

First up, pinsan honors. Congratulations to my cousin Tara on landing a new job and starting her career in event planning! She’s moving from the Old Bank District to her company’s lofty new digs in the Artist District! But she’s not the only one moving. Congratulations to pinsan Eileen who’s going to graduate school at the University of Connecticut this summer! Wow! She’s gonna be the most advanced pinsan ever!

Second, a blurb of a different color. You ever see those asinine billboards for some country music station that reads “Save a horse, ride a cowboy” and features the image of the aloof grin of some jockish white oaf-hick? What is that station trying to say? Is it some sort of pro-creaton procreation/promiscuity message? And with what type of person does that billboard connect? Lame. Should be “Save a horse, trample/shoot/maim a cowboy.”

Third, happy birthday to Sonia! She joins the Quarter Club now. Whoo! Got together with folks to celebrate and Maggie had the quote of the night: “Man, now they always shaft you on the fries! I hate that ‘Super Size Me’ movie!” Mike Cordero led the alcohol charge, barking orders to load up on free drinks with all the precision of a nostalgic WWII general. Musical highs included Sonia and the Girls’ tear-jerking, spine-tingling, gut-wrenching, heart-breaking, ear-canal-exploding karaoke rendition of “I’m a Slave 4 U,” and the scheduled performer’s fantastically good acoustic guitar “Like a Virgin” shout-along — no joke. As usual, my photography was breathtaking and hopefully I’ll have some of those photos in the distant future. All in all a great way to cap off the week. …One day early.

San Mateo is a disgusting and vile city. If I had my way, as Governor I would have the city totally demolished. Or I would divert exorbitant sums of money into giant shovel research, and then have the entire city of San Mateo scooped up by a flying machine carrying a massive shovel which would then carry the heathens to the Sun and their ultimate demise.

Why all the fuss? Jigsaw. This company sucks a load of crap. They’re a direct marketing firm that, you know, sells your personal information to other companies so they can molest you like a–let’s skip the analogies. The thing that makes this company especially notorious is the way they build there database. Any Joe Shmoe can create an account and upload the personal information of their friends, family, neighbors, business contacts, clergymen, gardeners, arch-rivals, and so on, for one dollar a pop. And just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, the company doesn’t provide a way for individuals to opt-out of their database. So, know anyone who’s just a little broke, just a little down on their luck, and just a little unscrupulous? Kill them now, while you still have your privacy.

To be honest, I think years of getting spam in my email has eroded my expectation of privacy. Which sucks. But actually I don’t really care if all the companies in the world have my street address and phone number. I lock my doors, and I screen my calls. What’s the worse they can do? I’ll admit, it sucks that cultural expectations of privacy are falling. The thing is, the ramifications could be terrible. A culture that doesn’t value privacy can creep slowly toward an Orwellian state. For example, such a culture might be more complacent towards a government that spies on it’s own citizens without oversight in the name of security. Yeah I know, hard to believe. I value privacy, but I just don’t expect it.

So Jigsaw has been quietly amassing their initial capital, and have received little press or public scrutiny. Take this recent response to an attempt I made to raise awareness about this wolf in sheep’s clothing. “Jigsaw? A new company? Who’s that? I’ll tell you one thing, I like their name. It’s cute and clever. Like my nephew, have you seen the latest pictures I have of him? Look at this one, here he’s flinging poop at the ice-cream man. And in this one, we’re showing him how to hunt deer! He’s so darn clever I’ll tell you. Where are you going? Wait don’t go! I have more! They’re really cute and clever! Come back here! Don’t get in your car! Why are you speeding away so fast? I have to show you these pictures! Do you want me to get in my car and follow you? Fine. Where are my keys? Here they are. I can only assume you’re taking me to a larger audience to whom I can show these pictures. Wait a minute. Why are you making a right on Main? Are you driving to the police department? Where are all these cops coming from? And why are they surrounding my car! Look officer, I just tried showing him these pictures. You might be interested yourself. What?! Your arresting me for harrassment? Ohhhh this really chaps my hide. I mean really seriously chaps them. Michael McGranahan, you better sleep with one eye open, ’cause I’m coming after you, punk! Your head is mine if it’s the last thing I do!”

Rather than continue risking life and limb, I am instead targeting the city of San Mateo. People know what San Mateo is, so it should be much easier to advocate about it. Just create a political party and I have all the infrastructure I need to spread lies. Once I build enough negative publicity, either the government of San Mateo will shut down Jigsaw, or we’ll have developed that flying-shovel machine I was talking about. (Donations accepted on About page.)

Mike’s Morsel: There are few things in this world grosser than warm, runny yogurt.