Jul 17
When I hear the term “puppy mills” this image comes to mind:
big belching smoke stacks, and a conveyor belt on one side that is just a non-stop line of puppies that gets emptied into one big puppy pile.
for some reason I think I might be a little off.
Check this article out… It made me laugh (then cry) when I noticed how many of these apply to where I work.
Nov 25
Friday night Aimee and I went to the “new” jordans furniture in Reading. They had pumpkin ice cream. It was good.
I think they should make pumpkin everything.
That is all.
Nov 21
Many many moons ago I started working on a event calendar type site where people could go to find open mic nights that were going on in their area.
Thanks to Alicia (for the web design work) and Jason (For the spiffy graphics) the site is finally up and running.
I encourage however few there are of you that look at my blog to check it out and tell me what you think.
So go check out http://openmicnight.net
Also, despite what this guy thinks. I refuse to accept calling a microphone a “mike”. My plan for the site is to eventually get picture up of many of the different venues and also add in reviews/comments and such, but I figured this was a good start. The other day, a visitor even submitted an actual event
Jul 24
Friday night, Aimee, Harold, Ryan and I went to faneuil hall to a bar. We left around 1am, and were driving down congress st to pick up 93 and I had just pulled up to the light on congress st and purchase st and I look at the intersection, and see a car completely on its side with a little bit of smoke coming out of it then I see the other car, which basically no longer had a front end it looked like it had just happened, because there was no police or ambulances. So we pull over to see if anyone needs any help. Some other guy had just pulled over as well, and he was on the phone talking to 911. Harold goes over to the car and sees that there is 3 girls still in the car on its side that couldn't get out, We see that their sunroof was open a tiny bit, so I help Harold rip the sunroof off the car which came off surprisingly easy and then the 3 girls crawled out of the car.The 2 in the front were wearing their seatbelts and looked OK, and the girl in the back wasn't wearing a seatbelt and she had a bloody nose and seemed fairly out of it but they all got out with a little help and then sat down in all the glass despite the fact that the accident happened about 2 buildings down from the fire station, it took a good 5 minutes for any ambulances to come and the first one to get there wasn't from that fire station the guy and the girl in the other car seemed pretty much OK, he had to get out through his window. After things calmed down a bit, I was talking to the guy that called 911 and he said he saw the accident happen and that the girls car had flipped over 3 times before it landed on its side.
A bit of an unusual way to end the night
Jul 13
If I remember correctly, to get a drivers license in Massachusetts, you need to bring money, your social security card, and your birth certificate. To get a passport, which is what I am in the process of slowly applying for, you need your license and the "long form" of your birth certificate.
So I go to the Saugus town hall this morning to get mine, and they dont ask for any ID. Just my name and my birth date. According to what Bill at work told me, your birth certificate is public record, so anyone can ask for it. I am not sure I believe that, but what I am confused about is what the actual point of all these IDs are.
The social security card is useless. It is a business card sized piece of card stock printed on a regular printer, and then the social security number is typed on it. That is beyond easy to forge these days if you wanted to. People blindly tell their social security number to anyone/anything that asks.
the birth certificate is a joke. If you dig through someones trash, overhear a phone conversation, are behind them in line at the bank..anything these days, you can overhear what their birth date is.
The drivers license can easily be obtained from the RMV just by printing up a social security card and going to the town hall to get the birth certificate.
And now the passport, which is like the premier form of ID these days is then close to just as easy to get. You have the drivers license now, you have the birth certificate, the birth certificate has your parents birth place, on it. How much harder could it be to social engineer both of your parents social security numbers?
I am sure I am oversimplifying things a bunch, but what a waste of time. I don't really even need a passport, but I am fairly confident that if I dont waste the $90 or so on it now, when september comes around I will be sitting in a dirty prison cell in conzumel mexico wishing I had one.
Jan 27
Okay, I might be way off base here, but why is there all this fuss about google.com cooperating with the chinese government to meet their censorship laws? granted I don’t know the whole story, nor am I familiar with chinese law…mostly because I have no desire to go there, or especially live there.
Not to pick on one person, especially since this is probably the 40th post from various places that I have seen on the topic, but this just happens to be the one I just came across from kuro5hin.org
In hopes of increasing its China market share, Google has announced its eagerness to be a better Thought Policeman by enforcing the PRC’s hardline censorship rules. To that end, the company has recently established a separate China domain, google.cn, which will streamline the tricky business of violating civil rights in the totalitarian Middle Kingdom. Ironically, the announcement comes as Google does battle with the Bush Administration, which is also trying to violate civil liberties by obtaining access to Americans’ Google search-results. If Google cooperates (as Yahoo recently has) with the Chinese government to spy on its citizens, then why can’t they cooperate with the US government’s efforts to snoop on its citizens? The price of doing business with China may be that our information civil liberties will be compromised throughout the rest of the world.
I happily enjoy and believe in the foundation of the U.S government, but China is far being like the U.S. They have censorship, they have a tyrannical government. Why would a business purposefully disregard a countries laws. Sure it is a worthy cause, and sure yes, the chinese should not be oppressed, but unfortunately that is not the way their government works. If google decided to “hold its ground” and not censor anything, China would simply ban google from being seen from anyone in China. How does that help anyone? now, instead of getting a good search engine that is unfortunately censored, you would get nothing…or in googles case, you would get their biggest competitor instead. Part of my points is that why does everyone keep saying phrases like “violating civil rights” do the chinese even have civil rights? I know we do, but again, the United States is not China. Our government is quite differant, so the rules that apply here don’t apply there. So yes, Google refusing to fork over its data to the U.S government is completly differant than complying with the Chinese government. Unfortunately they don’t have the luxury of all the freedoms that the United States has.
It is simply bad business, and a bad idea in general for google to refuse to comply in China. They will just get kicked out. What incentive does the Chinese government have to not just block the whole country from ever seeing google again?
Jan 24
Who decided that cow boy hats arn’t socially acceptable?
I wish I was wearing a cowboy hat right now, and I wish I had one of those fake metal looking plastic deputy badges too.
I would sit at my desk…. with my six shooter and take shots at people whenever they came near me.
Better yet, I would decorate the walls of my cube “wild west” style, and have a spitoon at the entrance to my cube, along with a piano playing that wild west music.
maybe I could have my cube just look like a big covered wagon. and every once in a while I would have to poke my head out the front to fight off some angry injuns. For lunch I could kill a buffalo, but I havn’t worked out yet how I could cook the meat.
The possibilities are endless, and it all starts with having a cowboy hat. Not that crappy one I bought before, not knowing it was “Aussie style” no one cares about Australian cowboys, but I get I could have had an excuse at that point to get a digeridooo. I would belt out sick tunes all day. Then, since the middle of my department is kind of close in, I bet we could have Kangaroo fights. None of my co-workers would go along with that, and would probably shake their heads and make their “mike is at it again” face. That is why I would have the six shooter. I would say bang! bang! and according to cowboy rules, they would have to dramatically fall backwards and break a wooden table.
Ahhh….the life. Some day cowboy hats will be accepted by society and the old west will be back once again.
Jan 23
I think every time I really go through all the RSS feeds I subscribe to, I end up subscribing to at least a couple new ones that day, which in turn leads to spending more time reading all these web sites I would have probably completely forgotten about otherwise.
I think reading all these feeds turned into some sick addiction. I log into News Gator, usually in the morning and immediately see the the massive number of unread articles. It is usually just shy of 1000, and I think that is only because of whatever article limits some of the feeds have. At that point, it is like some OCD problem to try to get the number to 0.
The problem is, obviously as the day progresses the maintainers of all these web sites post more articles, which slowly raises the number back up. So you really can’t hit 0. It is just an illusion. So I then at some point throw in the towel and exit News Gator running. Only to come back the next day with another 1000 some odd unread articles, plus all the “saved clippings” I marked as being interesting that I slowly……very slowly go through. That number only keeps getting bigger.
My ownly hope is that all this reading will speed up my poor word reading rate. Then, maybe someday I can enjoy a book without spending 3 months reading it, even though that is partially due to “not having the time” to read, which is just a lie I use to give me an excuse to watch more tv. But now having a DVR is just as bad as the RSS feed reader. I am recording more shows than I manage to watch in a given day. On the positive side, my DVR only has 2 tuners in it, and once 6pm hits, chances are one, if not both of t hose tuners are recording some crappy show Aimee likes. Gilmore Girls, One Tree Hill, The O.C, Laguna Beach, and the likes of all similar shows should all be cancelled. However, if they are cancelled, then I will find more shows to record, which will end up being more shows I need to watch, because mentally, I cannot make myself delete a show I recorded without watching it most of the time.
That means I am not dependant on shows like Gilmore Girls to stop me from spending more time watching shows I like. Instead I sit, basking in the comforting glow of the TV, using my computer, probably reading articles in News Gator. Living the endless cycle over and over.
I got a book for christmas that I actually really do want to read, which is Secrets & Lies, by Bruce Schneier. Christmas was a month ago and the book has not been touched. Maybe if the book was split into a long series of articles it could be stuck into the middle of my daily rotation.
Maybe all this article reading is training me to only have an attention span for 3 minutes at a time, then my eyes will just glaze over, and I’ll just be crying inside.
Bruce Schneier is a smart guy. I only caught on to his existence a few months back, but I think almost everything so far of his that I have read I either completely agree with, or had never thought of.
Not like any of that matters, but he wrote an article today about how security through verifying a persons credentials means nothing if the people verifying them don’t know what the credentials look like.
Like this:
Imagine you’re on an airplane, and Man A starts attacking a flight attendant. Man B jumps out of his seat, announces that he’s a sky marshal, and that he’s taking control of the flight and the attacker. (Presumably, the rest of the plane has subdued Man A by now.) Man C then stands up and says: “Don’t believe Man B. He’s not a sky marshal. He’s one of Man A’s cohorts. I’m really the sky marshal.”
What do you do? You could ask Man B for his sky marshal identification card, but how do you know what an authentic one looks like? If sky marshals travel completely incognito, perhaps neither the pilots nor the flight attendants know what a sky marshal identification card looks like. It doesn’t matter if the identification card is hard to forge if person authenticating the credential doesn’t have any idea what a real card looks like.
The real scary part is that this whole conversation was brought up because of how there is a rise in the number of fake officers pulling people over. I have had quite my fair share of times being pulled over, and I don’t think I have even once thought to somehow verify if the officer pulling me over was even an officer.
You see some form of flashing lights, you pull over, and some guy comes to your window and yells at you for something. What if this guy is pretending to be an officer and steals your car, rapes you, mugs you, or kills you?
I think the thing that tops it off is that from my own experience, if you question an officer when they pull you over, they tend to not be happy about it. I got yelled at by a female officer once because when I pulled over, I shut my car off, turned the dome light one, and put my hands on the top of the steering wheel (in clear view). She started yelling at me saying completely insane unrelated things like “what, do you hate cops or something?”
In my mind, I was making a shaky situation a little more comfortable. If your an officer approaching an unkown person in an unknown dark car, at night none the less, and you are also on patrol by yourself, you approach the car with caution, and usually with your hand on the handle of your gun ready to pull it out on a moments notice.
I am not sure about most people, but I don’t like guns being pointed at me, just like I am sure most officers do not like that either. If I make the situation as comfortable as possible for the officer, the chances of an accident happening are much slimmer, it puts the officer at ease, and maybe, because of that you might also get a warning instead of a ticket. I did get a warning that particular time, but how do you even respond to insane comments like that from a person that can take away your license, or for that matter accidentally kill you. Sure, getting killed is a bit far fetched, but it happens. This officer was apparantly on edge that night, and for some reason me “setting the scene” in such a way set her off.
Another time I was driving home from a late night out. No drinking involved, just aimless driving around with 2 friends. It was like maybe 2am, and I missed my friends steet. I stopped in the middle of the street and debated just backing up the 20 feet or so and turning onto his street, or going around the block instead. In that few seconds I was stopped, a car came into site behind me which obviously made backing up a bad idea, so I drove away to go around the block instead.
The car behind me happened to be an officer, he decided I was acting suspiscious, pulled me over, and individually interrogated all 3 of us along with running all of our licenses and my registration to see if their where any warrants/problems. There wern’t any problems, so he hands us all our licenses back and tells me to get back in the car and leave. Me, being a bit upset about being pulled over and interrogated for 20 minutes without any reason calmly said something along the lines of “would you mind telling me why exactly you pulled me over?” the cop flipped out, snatched my license back, screamed at me and told me to get into the car, then called for backup, and they then when over the outside of my car looking for any reason to give me a ticket. Then eventually told me to leave and go home.
Yes, in both stories the officers were real officers, but what happens when someone is in a situation where the officer is a fake? The lesson I learned over my past experiences is not question anything they say, say as little as possible, take the ticket and if you feel you got it unjustly, appeal it and deal with it in court instead. If a cop starts yelling at me and tells me to get out of the car, even if he says it over the PA from inside his car, yes, I am going to get out of the car because I know what happens if you don’t. Now I have just completely exposed myself and left myself in a real vulnerable position.
Sure I kind of veered way off course from Bruce Schneiers story, but he raises a real good point, and it is a legitimate real problem. People who look and claim to have authority normally are assumed to actually have authority. If they are faking it, you’re not going to realize it until it is too late.
So how are we any safer? Either on a plane or anywhere else?