A Vision of Cyberspace
About a week ago I went back to using Electric Sheep, a screensaver which uses your idle CPU cycles to generate animated fractals – the collective dream of sleeping computers.
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Basic Security Practices
http://www.al.com/redstone/index.ssf?/base/news/1132827506165260.xml&coll=1
As a government employee, you've heard it all before * lock your computer screen, protect your computer password, shred unwanted government documents, be careful about what is discussed in unclassified phone calls and e-mails, and practice vigilance in all matters related to workplace security.
Government employee? These are the bare essentials that any one who’s in contact with technology for more than 10 minutes a month should practice. Of course, you’d replace “shred unwanted government documents” with “shred everything but the newspaper”, “unclassified phone calls and e-mails” with “anything that isn’t encrypted with a 2048 bit key”, and “workplace security” with “personal security”.
1,462 days
As of this very minute, my blog has been running for 1,462 days (4 years and 2 days). That is, my blog has been running on some sort of automated software for that long (blogger.com lead to b2/cafelog which lead to wordpress). If you count updates via static html, you can add another couple years onto that count.
(I find this interesing.)
Michael Badnarik's Constitution Class
For the past couple weeks, I’ve been watching Michael Badnarik‘s 8 hour Constitution Class available on archive.org. It’s an excellent video series that introduces you to the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights – what it says, and how the government has bastardized it. He focuses on privileges vs. rights, property, the legality of the IRS and Federal Reserve, inflation and deflation. I’m not even a Libertarian (although I agree with him on more than one issue) and I’m giving two thumbs up.
Go. Watch it.
Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House
I’ve finished reading R. U. Sirius’ Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House, as per recommendation of Douglas Rushkoff. It’s an excellent book, which covers, as the title suggests, counterculture from the early counterculture of Socrates, Tao and Zen to the Enlightenment, Transcendentalism, Beats, Hippies, Punks, Hackers, Ravers, and even mentions S.P.A.Z.. The second part of the book (it’s split into three parts – defining counterculture, pre and post Hiroshima) reads more or less as a condensed history of the Western world.
Exploration
I walked around downtown Bellingham today for a few hours.
Pirates-R-Us
I saw Pirates-R-Us tonight. They were sort of like The Hobogoblins, but nowhere near as good.
They killed the internet
It seems Western‘s proxy is down, or something else is preventing me from accessing the internet without going through Tor.
Update: Apparently the problem was thus: “An upgrade of a piece of equipment, during which the netmask was incorrectly defined in such a way that certain IP addresses (for example google, yahoo) were thought to be on the local network (i.e. No Route to Host as people saw).”