Wed, 12 Nov 2008
Annoying Fashion Trend
As everyone knows, I'm way into women's fashion and trends despite my own non-sartorial appearance (hey, the guayavera and jeans look works for me, so I stick with it). So I just wanted to report on an annoying trend that the lovely ladies of SF have been getting into for the past month it seems. It's almost as annoying as the winter capri pants fiascos I've seen for the past few years. Anyway- the party foul? Rings on the middle finger of the left hand. No big deal you say? Well, it's a big deal to me because the solo ring on the middle finger of the left hand confuses me into thinking the girls are wearing an engagement or wedding ring for a second or two. That's enough to make me stop my oh-so-subtle scoping of said lady- because for me, wedding/engagement rings are like inviso-rings. I'll instantly stop "scanning" when I see one (well, I pretend to)*. *Although my friend Angela says I shouldn't adhere so strictly to this policy as "married women like to be checked out too". Anyway, girls, I like jewelry and all, but not confusing stuff. It's throwing me off my game. Thanks
your #1 fan,
Kenneth edit: I should have written more clearly- what I'm really talking about is when the girls only have 1 ring on total, and of all the fingers they pick the middle finger on the left hand. Also- this morning, a woman had a really nice ornamental ring on her left hand ring finger, that confused me for a bit .. but it was so large that it was obviously not a wedding band/engagement ring. Okay, I'l shut up now. Thanks 12 Nov 16:37 | /rants_and_raves | 1 comment(s)
Tue, 11 Nov 2008
Minor? Rant - Office Coffee
The instructions for making coffee using the machines at the office:
put two scoops of grounds into filter which is in the filter basket. click 'full pot'. after pot is made, move it to the side and make sure the lid is closed. Enjoy your coffee. But there's always one puss who thinks the fresh coffee is too strong... boo hoo. And you know what they do? They make one giant weak ass pot of coffee and don't put a note on the carafe with a warning "hey, this coffee sucks, kthanks". So hey, don't ruin the pot of coffee for everyone, just make the pot as you should and pour yourself a half mug and put hot water in your mug. Don't ruin everyone else's day. Assholes. Next rant should be about the dorks who cut the Friday donuts into thirds. "ooh, half a donut is too much boo hoo...." 11 Nov 13:06 | /rants_and_raves | 1 comment(s)
Thu, 06 Nov 2008
Random Thoughts on CA/Prop8
I grew up in a state that doesn't have voter initiatives. I still think it's kind of odd to have them when there is already a full time legislature. That's what they're there for. Granted, I understand the opposite argument that it's less weird and more democratic to have initiatives, but I still think it's a sign that the legislature is slacking if voters are trying to do things "on their own". But what really boggles my mind is that the state allows people from other states to organize the initiatives. Like what happened with Prop 8. To me, that's crazy. I can't imagine that happening in Texas. Imagine that the great state of Texas had initiatives and imagine one getting close to a vote that was even only rumored to have a source in an out-of-state organization. All you would have to do to defeat the bill/ref/initiative would be just to use your deep Texas senatorial drawl and say, "ladies & gentlemen this here voter ref was financed by people from .... Oklahoma" (or some other lesser state) and boom, end of initiative. That's one of the reasons why I think it's so weird that the peeps in CA let the folks in Utah organize and get stuff on their ballots. links:
Sam Spade Blog rant on the LDS
La Times and a Daily Show clip to lighten the mood
sacbee story 06 Nov 13:43 | /rants_and_raves | 5 comment(s)
Wed, 10 Sep 2008
And to calm me down ...
How about this after that last rant? 10 Sep 15:50 | /rants_and_raves | 2 comment(s)
Garbage Rant
I was reminded of something when reading one of Jen's posts. She wrote:
I was driving behind a man this morning who felt that it was appropriate to throw his empty Starbucks cup out of the window, onto the roadside. Now, my opinion about Starbucks aside (HATE IT. Venti? Come ON...it's LARGE), I live in the Bay Area where being environmentally conscious is almost a religion.The weird thing is that I've always thought the same thing but yet I've always been shocked (although the feeling's faded) about how much people litter out here in CA (SF in particular, but Jen's story was shocking to me because it's the "clean south bay"). My parents and I have this running joke about places being "first world"- I can't remember exactly how the joke got started but I think we started it after my first visit to Switzerland (I was hunting Nazi descendents and tracing Jewish funds that had been "repatriated" to Swiss banks... but that's another story). I think I had said something about how spotless the place was and my dad said, "now that's first world"-- and I said, "no, it's .5-- it's cleaner than first world". We don't just use the joke about garbage though. But when I moved to SF I had this image in my head- "Silicon Valley inventors, no garbage, wired busses that don't make noise, e-poppin/rave-attending coders, Wired magazine readers, sci-fi writers, hippies, restaurants, wine and bad football teams". You know- real "first world". But the thing is, San Francisco is by FAR the dirtiest fucking placed I've ever lived in. And the rolling blackouts wiped out any hope for "first world" status in my eyes. I still like it (most of the time), but good lord people, clean up after yourselves. I dunno, maybe there's no equivalent out here to growing up in Texas where the motto "Don't Mess With Texas" isn't just the most successful anti-littering campaign ever but a creed to live by. Maybe it's because we'd kick each others' asses (or at least report them to the Rangers) if we saw litterers and people out here don't do that. I partly wouldn't blame people if they did throw trash because of some Berkeley tree-sitter saying "omg omg don't litter" all the time.
Of course if a SF cop did this, some PBR-drinkin' fixie rider would start crying In my hood there is a ton of pink plastic bag trash- especially on Clement. The times I've yelled at people to not litter, they suddenly feigned a lack of understanding of English. (I bet I get bad comments about that line). And it's not just my neighborhood (which is cleaner on Lake). There are problems downtown too and all over-- Recently I was wandering over to Angie & Mike's in the Castro and saw this one dude trying to sneak behind the library- he had already dumped out some bags of trash in the yard of the yellow house on the end of the street and was getting ready to take a dump. (yes, pulling his pants down to defecate -dump, yes in theird 'yard') I was about to yell at the guy and the homeowners came out and said "ummm excuuuuuuuuse me, that's our yard sir, you need to get out of there soon." Soon? WTF? How about:"GTFO our property and take your bags of trash with you, and you have 25 seconds to do it."? Johnny D & the Rocket 88s I'm not sure I have a solution to the problem . . . but I think some tough love and billyclubs are in order. How about we arm Jen and let her rove around giving out citations? That'd be a start. 10 Sep 14:39 | /rants_and_raves | 4 comment(s)
Tue, 02 Sep 2008
New Muni Record
I guess school's back in session- or the new people have started their jobs downtown as the bus has been more full these days. Last Wednesday there was this dude sitting in front of me who was all fidgity. He kept opening and closing an envelope that had citizenship papers/instructions in it. I figured he was trying to memorize an address, but wasn't doing a great job. He kept looking around and it was making me nervous (not to mention the woman next to him). As the bus was crossing Polk, he spazzed out and grabbed the cord to signal a stop. But as it was the express bus, I giggled inside. Even though I'm an a-hole, I was going to tell him that there was no stop for him and let him down easy. . . but no, spaz boy JUMPED up (the bus was full btw) and he forced his way to the door. When he forced his way to the door, he elbowed the hottie I'd been staring at in the head. She even told him that there wasn't a stop and to not hit her in the head. But I think there was a language issue. I think I'm becoming conservative because I think there should be a new section of the citizenship test. I don't care if you know who the 14th president (Franklin Pierce) was, but you should know 1) what the difference is between a regular and express bus is and more importantly 2) don't elbow hot chicks in the head! The sad thing is that afterwards, I thought, weird, that was the 2nd day in a row where someone tried to get off early and didn't realize it was an express. And then Friday I thought (again after someone else tried to get off and was pulling that cord like there was no tomorrow) "weird, that's 4 days in a row, that's never happened before".... So you know what? It happened AGAIN today. That's a new record! And today it wasn't just one person, it was two! The first one was a goober who thought there was one more stop after Fillmore (that's the "usual"). The second was a cute girl in a halter top dress (yum) in front of me who was desperate to get off the bus around Hyde. At least people tried to warn the girl, but she wouldn't take off her headphones so she didn't understand what was going on. But this rash of "jumpers" must end soon . . . 02 Sep 12:34 | /rants_and_raves | 1 comment(s)
Thu, 31 Jul 2008
More SF "Hacker" Stuff
Infoworld continues to have the best information on the Terry Childs case (new article)
(page 3) entering the VPN information into the court records made them public -- the San Francisco district attorney's office committed a significant security breach, opening up VPN access to anyone who cared to look at the document. Although the passwords alone were not enough to provide complete access to the city networks, they did constitute one part of the VPN's two-phase authentication configuration.And then later on the same page:
Nearly two days after the DA's office divulged these passwords to the public, DTIS changed all the passwords, locking everyone out of the city VPN services until they had reconfigured their client to the new passwords. Ironically, this was the first time the city network failed since Childs' arrest.
... there's more to read here ...
31 Jul 15:34 | /rants_and_raves | 0 comment(s)
Thu, 24 Jul 2008
I Miss MTV Too :(
B&U has a good post up today abut MTV
In our lifetimes, MTV has popped up out of nothing, cut its own place in the world and sat in that place until they completely ditched the M and stuck mostly with the TV.The post is here and it's more a rant about movies and Viacom and biz. But it's a good read. 24 Jul 13:50 | /rants_and_raves | 0 comment(s)
Viacom's teenaged cash-baby has grown stale to those of us that have been through one too many reinventions. We keep crying out: "Show more videos, you're MTV!." and they keep responding with the very rational argument that they have study after study proving that no one watches videos on MTV no matter what time they air them, and MTV needs to make money as a brand. Videos are no longer financially viablefor Viacom's flagship property.
Wed, 23 Jul 2008
Even More . . .
Inforworld has great column up with more details about teh Sf h4x0r if you're interested. Some key points/quotes:
.As for the impact of [Childs'] actions to the rest of the City, the mayor's statement basically has it right. The network is completely up and running. No servers that I'm aware of are affected. No one has had any downtime (yet). But until they get back into those routers, they can't make any changes. I don't know yet if Terry's lockout applies only to the FiberWAN or also to the other routers, firewalls, switches, etc. in the City network..Wheeee 23 Jul 13:53 | /rants_and_raves | 0 comment(s)
.Terry's area of responsibility was purely network. As far as I know (which admittedly is not very far), he did not work on servers, except maybe VoIP servers, AAA servers, and similar things directly related to the administration of the network. My suspicion is that you are right about how he was 'monitoring e-mail'; it was probably via a sniffer, IPS, or possibly a spam-filtering/antivirus appliance. But that's just conjecture on my part..
A key point made in the e-mail is that Childs' managers and coworkers all knew that he was the only person with administrative access to the network. In fact, it was apparently known and accepted in many levels of the San Francisco IT department. Again, quoting from the e-mail:
"This is where it gets tricky for the prosecution, IMO, because the localized authentication, with Terry as sole administrator, has been in place for months, if not years. His coworkers knew it (my coworkers and I were told many times by Terry's coworkers, 'If your request has anything to do with the FiberWAN, it'll have to wait for Terry. He's the only one with access to those routers'). His managers knew it.
"Other network engineers for the other departments of the City knew it. And everyone more or less accepted it."
sf h4x0r (again)
So . . . Batman wannabe Newsom just goes down to the jail, talks to "teh h4x0r" and gets the passwords, no problem. Wow. sfgate story here. No press conference needed, no talking to the DA first . . .he must've wooed him w/ his Bruce Wayne looks and a pack of cigs . . . I like this part:
"He gave the mayor the codes, and then we went over to (the Technology Department)" and gave the codes to computer engineers, Ballard said. "And when we got back to City Hall, we were each separately questioned by the (police) inspector, because we are now witnesses in the case."I can see them calling back-- "uh, can we talk to the prisoner again? yeah, hey, that pw didn't work . . .what? no, I put gnewsom@sf.gov, what? take out the @sf.gov part? Hey, that worked! Thanks! Kbye!" And the last paragraph of the story let the defense attorney get in a dig:
But there was a snag, Ballard said - the code that Childs supplied to Newsom didn't function immediately. Newsom had to call back the attorney, who provided more information, and the system started working, officials say.
Referring to the felony computer-tampering counts, Crane said, "Mr. Childs intends to not only disprove those charges, but also expose the utter mismanagement, negligence and corruption at (the Technology Department) which, if left unchecked, will in fact place the city of San Francisco in danger."I gotta get a job with the city . . man, 6 figures!? Wooo . . . 23 Jul 11:46 | /rants_and_raves | 0 comment(s)
