My friend Fourth Breakfast posted this link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=D9bMM3prOFo which is an, um, "interpretation" of Brokeback Mountain. Absolutely hilarious!

Tags: Humor

One of advantages to having your own domain *and* running your own mail server is that you can create as many email addresses as you want on your domain. So some time ago, tired of the spam thing, I started tracking "who does what" with my email addresses, by assigning each contact with a new company a unique email address.

There are few surprises. Shortly after linking my Safeway grocery card with my United Airlines Mileage Plus account, my United Airlines address started receiving emails from Safeway. I posted my address on my high school's alumni website and immediately began receiving emails telling me I had just inherited $2 million dollars. Harvesting bot. Things like this make sense.

Other things are surprising. Like receiving male enhancement spam at an address reserved for transactions with legit companies. Today's example is LetsTalk.com - a popular cellular phone service reseller. While their service when I placed my order with them was excellent, the fact that my LetsTalk specific email is now receiving massive amounts of spam doesn't reflect well on the company and raises concerns about their security practices. I've fired off a letter to the company and we'll see what we get back.

Other sites that I have, in the past, tracked to email address leaks are such popular sites like classmates.com (though I haven't received email to that address in a few years now) and one of my *former* banks. That latter event was quite interesting, especially since I proved to their security officer that the breach was coming from a compromised PC *inside* their corporate network. They lost my business not so much because one of their PCs became infected, but because their security officer was so cavalier in handling the manner (oh, your email is not private information, I can find it anywhere on the web).

The bottom line - as has often been pointed out, your information is not as secure as it seems.

Tags: Technology

We decided to head out for ice cream last night as a family and finally decided to test a theory that we've had for a while.

Question: Does a forward facing car seat fit in the Mini Cooper?

Answer: Yes

So the next question: Does Declan like driving around with the top down on the Mini Cooper?

Answer: Yes

How do we know? Aside from the wide grin on Declan's face for the entire ride last night, when we went to take the Freestyle to go shopping this morning, Declan kept tugging at the door handle of the Mini and looked confused when we put him in the Freestyle.

Tags: Declan

Last Thursday, Andrew and I had a chance to visit and ride on the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad originating in Cumberland, MD. It was a great chance to spend time together and to for me to get out of the office for a day.

The excursion starts as a 1 hour train ride from Cumberland, MD to Frostburg, MD on tracks from the original Western Maryland and C&P railroads. On our trip, we were pulled by a Western Maryland diesel locomotive, but other trains are pulled by steam engines. Below is a particularly scenic shot taken in Frostburg.



More pictures can be found at http://www.stickman.org/Pictures/Pictures-2007/WMR/

After the 1 hour train ride, the train engine is turned around on a turn table (you get to watch!) and you are then given an hour and a half to eat lunch and explore Frostburg. One of the neat attractions in Frostburg was the Thrasher Carriage Museum which houses various restored horse-drawn carriages and sleighs. There's also plenty of scenery to enjoy in the surrounding area and town. You then go back to Cumberland on the same train you came in.

It was a 2.5 hour drive from our house to Cumberland, but I think we'll be going back. In the fall, I think the scenery should be spectacular and the people all around were friendly and made the trip thoroughly enjoyable.

Tags: Andrew

My friend Fourth Breakfast has tagged me for one of these little blog tag games. Like my friend, I'm going to limit my responses in a few cases otherwise, we're going to be here all year....

Jobs I've held:
I was a Ride Operator at Six Flags Magic Mountain in high school and part of college. I ran roller coasters. When I worked there, I was known as the only operator to ever hit Emergency Stop on Freefall 3 times, and not be terminated or reprimanded for any of the occurrences.



I've also been an engineer for McDonnell Douglas, Megatek, and Sun Microsystems (current).
I've been systems administrator for the University of Michigan and the University of California, San Diego.

Places I've lived:
Schenectady, New York
Canyon Country, California
Ann Arbor, Michigan
San Diego, California
Hershey, Pennsylvania (actually, Palmyra, but close enough)

Movies I can watch over and over:
The Hunt for Red October

My guilty pleasures:
Playing blackjack in Las Vegas

Shows I enjoy:
House
The Weather Channel

Places I've been on vacation:
Too numerous to list, so I'll say Lake George, New York.

Favorite foods:
Anything Italian, but Veal Parmigiana is my benchmark food.
Just about anything else my wife makes is next.

Websites I visit daily:
http://www.stickman.org/ (of course)

Body parts I've injured:
Knees. Both of them. Not requiring surgery, but I know when the weather is changing....

Awards I've won:
I choose to list "Perfect Attendance" in 3rd grade.

Nicknames I've been called:
Stickman. Or course. The origin goes back to my Magic Mountain days...


Now that I've played, we'll see if Mr. Chuckles is game...

Tags: Blog Tag

The silence in the last week is because we've embarked on a new project at home - painting. Our house is 2 years old now, and we've decided we're tired of white everywhere. So we're repainting. We started with Andrew's room, and after one week of work, here's the result:



Now if you wonder why it takes a week to paint a room, this is an evening/spare time project, and, I had to do the ceiling. I usually go out of my way to avoid painting ceilings. There was no alternative in this case because during the drywall repair for the typical settling nail pops and such, we discovered that the touch up paint was still very noticeable. Repainting the ceiling was the only way to fix that...

The colors are Hawthorne Yellow and Linen White (from Benjamin Moore). Great paint, by the way. Very happy with the stuff and the local dealer.

Now, we're on to the dining room...

Tags: Home Improvement

I decided to upgrade the system I use for primarily work at home to something newer. 3.5 years is an eternity in PC technology, so I saw what seemed like a nice cheap system with which to upgrade. This was a Dell Dimension C521 w/ a dual core AMD64 Athlon processor (the 4400 series so 2.3 GHz), 2GB of RAM, 320GB of hard drive, and an nVIDIA built-in graphics controller. For $560 (before tax) it seemed like a nice system which would be a nice boost in performance for not much money. Given that I would then use my old system to replace Andrew's 7 year-old $399 Dell Special, it seemed even better (Andrew's system is so old, it won't even run Windows XP).

Unfortunately, one of the conclusions I've arrived at is that I hate Windows Vista. First, there's that ever irritating Windows issue of needing to get a new driver. Everything needs a new driver. And not every thing has a Vista driver. Arrgggh.

Next, realize that I work for Sun. One of my goals is to run Solaris on this thing. Multi-OS booting on a PC used to be pretty straightforward under Windows XP. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Windows Vista, which seems to insist on being in charge of things. It's not straightforward at all.

To get Vista to dual-boot with Solaris, fortunately, someone wrote some very nice (if somewhat complicated) instructions on how to accomplish this. With these instructions as a guide, I'm making progress. Now just need to get audio working, and the network working....

Keep your eyes on the Blog for more updates.

Tags: Technology