Way, way in the back

I'm gonna try to do this without being too harsh. And yet it must be done.

In a previous post, I've lamented how fantastically polarized we've become as a nation. I wasn't alive during the 1960's, but I gather that as a political era, it was similarly turbulent. But I have a hard time imagining that the discourse at the time could possibly have been as irrational as it is today.

And now, while browsing a few blogs during lunch today, I've found the absolute quintessential example of this phenomenon. It can be found here.

This is the part where I don't want to be too harsh. "Matthew", the creator of that blog and poster of that item could be ten years old, for all I know. I certainly hope so, for his sake. But even so, let's examine the "reasoning" here.

• Humanity sucks and has lost it's right to exist.


• The devil George Bush wants to chop down all the trees so we can have cheap gas.


• The destruction of tree slugs will lead inevitably to the extinction of humanity.
  (Why should this matter if we've lost our right to exist anyway?)

... And he learned all this on a Transformers message board. And to those of you wondering, no he is not some electrical engineer (who also has a Ph.D in microbiology) who was discussing advanced electrical transformers. No, the message board he mentions does indeed concern the venerable line of toys that spawned animated television shows back in the 80's (Full disclosure: I loved the transformers. When I was 13). It takes a conscious effort of the will to not descend into ad hominem attacks here, an effort at which I've already partially failed. But seriously; What makes this person qualified to pronounce on forest management policy?

I have to stop now, because I've nearly run out of rational things to say about this kind of thinking. I feel like an idiot for having written as much as I have. One last thought: I'm sure this guy thinks that it's George Bush that's the big idiot. Take a look, America; here comes your future.

Over at National Review Online, Peter Wood has penned a reverential but breathtakingly over-analyzed piece on one of my favorite websites, HomeStarRunner.com

I agree with at least one part of his analysis, that being that the appeal of the Chapman brothers' work is mostly cultural. I believe it's a pretty lean slice of the culture to which the appeal fully applies, however, and I think I'm right in the center of the slice. Time after time on that site I've seen a little joke that I'd swear I must be one of about four people on Earth who fully appreciate.

Case in point: In one of Strong Bad's emails a few weeks ago, someone wanted to know what the craziest cartoon he could make would be like. What followed was something between a tribute to and a lampooning of such surrealist cartoons as George Herriman's "Krazy Kat" (or at least it seemed to me to be so. Perhaps I, like mr. Wood, am over-analyzing here). At the end, after Strong Bad is finished introducing all the characters ("Hey Steve!") in his crazy cartoon, he tells us that He'd also be in it, but his head would be an old keyboard, and when he got mad it would play the demo.

When the Keyboard first appeared on Strong Bad's head, I chuckled to myself thinking "that looks just like the little Casio I got for my birthday when I was about 12". When the demo started playing, I realized that it was, in fact, the very same keyboard. It'd been years since I'd heard that little ditty, and yet I could remember every last note. Give me a few minutes on a piano and I could probably tap it out. It was a spooky moment of cultural connection.

Then again, maybe it's just funny.

I finally got around to doing a good once-over of the stylesheet for this thing (known in blogger-ese as the "template"). I picked the "Jellyfish" layout becuase it was the first one that caught my eye with the banner-top/content-left/links-right format. The colors weren't as important as that layout, which seems to my mind to be the most natural way of presenting a blog, in spite of the counter-example being set by the titans of the blogosphere. In case you hadn't noticed: I'm a fan of simplicity. Particularly where web-based presentations are concerned. I am decidedly in the minority in this respect.

This year in Columbus, Ohio, spring never ended. In defiance of a long-standing pattern, we got plenty of rain all through the summer months. Here it is pushing September, and my lawn is not just still green, but still growing. Still producing those nice emerald-green new shoots. Normally by this time in high summer, my grass would be a field of dead brown fibrous matter that turns to dust if you touch it. You literally have to keep from walking on it during those times, since a single set of tracks can show up as neat, foot-shaped bald spots when things briefly green back up after the rain comes back in late September of a normal year.

The difference in moisture levels has affected more than just the plants, as well. There's a new breed of spider that has taken over the outside of my house this year. Normally, there would be tons of Phidippus Audax running around out there. These are medium-sized jumping spiders that are black and furry, except for a white diamond on their back, and two long, white triangles on their undersides. I'd gotten used to seeing them around the house during the summer. This year I haven't seen a single one.

Instead, I've encountered dozens of some new species. I haven't identified them for sure yet, but the leading condender is Dolomedes Tenebrosus, or the "dark fishing spider". They're large and predatory-looking, resembling wolf spiders, but are web-spinners. The ones around my house build large (18 inches or so) webs of classical shape. I've also seen them doing other little tricks, one of which is to get up into a high spot and drop down very suddenly on things. Mostly on me, as a matter of fact. I've taken to calling them "tiger spiders" both becuase of their color and their attitude.

Some nighttime images of my "new friends"

I've been out trying to get the trim on my house painted this summer, and I've run into these things repeatedly, usually when about nineteen feet off the ground, hanging precariously onto my "light duty" (read "wobbly-ass") aluminum ladder, with a can of paint in my hand. I definitely preferred the jumpers.

On saturday I was out finishing up one of the corners of my house, and I kept seeing yellow-jackets flying nearby. I've been nailed by these guys so many times I can't remember them all, but I've developed an aversion to them since last year when a particularly nasty one got me in the back of the hand, which swelled up like a clown glove for about two weeks. Also last year, a bunch of them decided to set up house in my garage. I took about three years off my life with the amount and variety of chemical agents I employed trying to kill them. Someone should send that moron Hans Blix out to my garage. I guarantee even he would find me in violation of some international chemical weapons treaty, even a year later.

So anyway, just as I was thinking "I hope those yellowjackets don't have a nest around here", I looked up from where I was painting under the eaves. About a foot above my head I see a few dozen angry-looking yellowjackets all standing on the wood near the corner of the gutter. I swear each and every one was looking at me. I very nearly fell of the ladder trying to get down.

As I was peeking up at them a few minutes later, trying to figure out what to do, with my head just above a separate section of the roof, one of these big tiger spiders comes out of the gutter about an inch and a half away from my face. I hadn't even seen her web. I managed to hold still as she went up her web, which I could now see was anchored on the same place where all the yellowjackets were. She climbed right up and tried to hide in a corner near them. Directly over my head, the contents of which had momentarily stopped functioning. Some little corner of my brain thought I might get to see a spider/yellowjacket grudge match, so I just sort of stood there, four steps up the ladder. About a second later one of the yellowjackets went into the spiders's little corner, and they did indeed get into some kind of tussle. Locked in a death embrace, they both let go.

And dropped directly toward my face. And that time I did fall of the ladder trying to get off it, which is why I'm limping around this week.

I don't get to watch a whole lot of TV. Not that I'm too good for it or anything (well... Maybe network TV), just that I've fallen out of the habit of watching it regularly. When I do watch TV, I usually turn to the discovery channel. As of this writing, they're wrapping up their annual "shark week". Shark week is an entire week of ducumentaries about, well, sharks.

Included this year was an entire show about a shark behaviorist who was bitten by a bull shark while filming a nature show. Consequently, the whole thing was caught on video. He was standing in waist-deep water with the nature show's host completely surrounded by sharks when it happened. I think the whole point of the bit, had it been filmed without the expert's leg being nearly bitten off, would have been to show what docile creatures sharks really are.

Now I certainly don't want to make light of the man's injuries; He lost the majority of his calf muscle, and I'm sure that had to hurt, but there's a significant point here having to do with the way sharks are portrayed in these documentaries. We're constantly told that the shark is a misunderstood animal. Sharks that attack people are merely confused, having mistaken the the person for a seal, or having been whipped into a frenzy by some nearby fish, or whatever. This isn't the first time I've noticed this effect, but it's certainly the most egregious, since the video just seems to show a hungry shark taking a bite out of someone.

Is it really so hard to believe that when a shark bites you, it means to? What is it with this constant excuse-making for these toothy creatures?

I wanted to see if I could make the title of a posting a link.

My wife, son, and I were at Port Columbus International Airport the other night to pick up my mother-in-law, who was returning from a trip to Africa. We were there for nearly an hour, and the whole time I had this vague sense of unease. More so than is usual at the airport nowadays.

We were just about to leave when I figured it out. The female voice coming over the PA system to make various banal announcements either was, or was an absoulte aural dead-ringer for, the woman who voiced "mother", the computer from the original Alien.

I'd hardly classify myself as an experienced blogger, and the whole "blogging about blogging" thing seems to be so much recursive navel-gazing, but I have noticed a peculiar effect that thinking about this page has had on me, and it seems worthy of note.

Often against my better judgement, I keep up with the news. In general, I will have read, or heard of, a story some time before it inevitably becomes blog-fodder. At first I suffered the urge to opine on these matters via this blog, since I almost never find myself at a loss for an opinion about the events of the day.

But the more blogs I read, the more that urge went away. At this point, the thought of writing anything about the California recall, or Howard Dean, or the heat wave currently afflicting Europe, or almost any other current event strikes me as being something that transcends futility, and rises right up into the realm of the counterproductive. The political climate in this nation has become wildly, outrageously, and almost comically polarised. I'm experiencing a powerful urge to not add my voice to the cacophony.

An obvious exception here was the recent windows-based RCP worm, now variously named "LoveSAN" or "blaster". I suppose the difference was the fact that the thing reached right out and touched me, as it were. I had direct knowledge of the thing. Even then I resisted the urge to spew invective about Microsoft. I mean, you can go out and read slashdot for that, right?

So I guess I'm wondering if this is inexperience, cowardice, or wisdom. Some combination of those, and perhaps others?

And of course, I have discovered that my previous classification of the bloggers hosted by this service as people whose boundless hatred for the President only marginally eclipses their slightly-more-bounded hatred for themselves was, indeed, too generalized. Apparently the conservative, politically neutral, well-adjusted, or simply more topic-engaged bloggers do their updates earier in the week. Maybe if by Friday all the updates occuring are of the "I HATE GEORGE BUSH HE IS THE DEVIL OH GOD I WISH I COULD TELL THEM I'M DYING INSIDE" variety, I can conclude that there may be a pattern.

Had a wonderful time last evening battling the new windows RPC worm making it's way around. I guess it says something about me that when my machine starts mysteriously blowing up, I break into a cold sweat, thinking about all the email I'm not gonna get backed up, and all the documents and other work I'm gonna lose. When did I become so dependent upon these stupid humming beige boxes? I remember seeing the security bulletin, and that it was marked "critical", and then doing nothing about it, so this is at least partially my fault.

Anyway, a few tips for those who may be afflicted:

1.) The default XP install is set to give you a 1-minute warning and irrevocably restart the whole damn ball of wax when the RPC service dies. In order to do the work needed to correct this problem, you need to at least turn that effect off, or else you'll just have to be really fast (and lucky). You can alter this behavior by running the "services" admin thingy ("services admin service" sounds like it needs to be reported to the department of redundancy deparment). Under the properties for the RPC service, you can either increase the time you're given before the restart, or turn it off altogether, which is what I did (temporarily). You could also just disconnect your network cable, which is what I ended up doing later anyway.

2.) One of the things this worm seems to be doing is rendering the nice little windows mechanisms that would automatically get the patch for you insensate. I have no idea whether this is happening becuase the RPC service on your own machine is blown up, or if the auto-update services at MS are getting hammered, but I don't suppose it matters. Myself, I chose to download the patch manually (since that functionality still works even after the RPC service blows up) and run it manually. The download page for the XP Home patch is here.

3.) I remained under attack while trying to get the patch to run. I finally just disconnected my stupid cable modem, rebooted, ran the patch, shut down, reconnected the cable modem, and started back up.

4.) Remember to set the windows response to the RPC service dying back to something safe (reverse what you did in step 1, if you did it).

5.) After these steps, I think you're safe from further attack. But you most likely are infected. Congratulations. I originally thought that the attack on my machine had been uneffective, since the symptom I was observing was the just RPC service dying. As it turned out, though, I had been infected. My unconfirmed impression is that once the attack is complete, and the executable content is in your windows/system32 directory, and a nice new registry key is created to run that executable content on startup, the thing blows up the RPC service on purpose, so that windows will restart, and it can get itself running. I'm irresistably reminded of a scene from the movie "Die Hard" at this point (You wanted a miracle? I give you Microsoft.)

6.) You need to get that key out of your registry. It's under (don't quote me here) "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\software\microsoft\windows\currentversion\run", and it's name is "windows auto update". Sounds nice and professional, no?

7.) After that's done you need to reboot, and then remove the file "msblast.exe" from your windows/system32 directory.

Or better yet, after patching you could just get a nice little removal tool here.

Programming for time is an ugly process. You always start out wanting to do something so simple, and as you peel back the layers of complication, you come to realize that the thing you wanted to do really isn't simple at all. I used to believe that the folks at Sun had messed up the time implementation in Java after Java2, but I've come to believe, after many frustrations, that they just created a framework where time-based programming can express its own special ugliness more succinctly.

For a bunch of stupid, ugly reasons, I ended up putting some data in the database a while ago hoping to use the "epoch" date to indicate a sort of baseline. Of course, the epoch is understood as having occurred in Greenwich. Date objects that I don't take a lot of care to build correctly are naturally understood to be hours ahead of GMT here in good old Eastern Standard Time (or is it Eastern Daylight Time? I can never remember). Five hours ahead right now, in August. Six hours ahead when it actually happened, in January (Or is it Four? When exactly are we "saving daylight" again? Is it the other way around? I can never rememember). Of course some of that is moot in Arizona, which deserves credit for discarding the whole concept of daylight savings time, and simultaneously deserves a boot to the head for discarding the whole concept of daylight savings time.

My personal opinion is that if a single world government were ever established, it would have no choice but to be be tyranny on an almost unimaginable scale. One that would make the old Soviet Union look like elementary school detention in comparison. And yet if it would establish a single, universal, and understandable standard for time in my code, maybe it would be worth it. Or so I come to believe after a day of messing around with this crap.

The Blogger access site I turn to to log in has a little feature that shows the last 10 blogs that have been updated. I figured these might act as a good representative sample of what people are blgging about. After a few hours of looking at them at random, I've made the following observations:

1.) Every single person using this system is apoplectic with rage at George W. Bush. Hates his guts. Irrationally so.

2.) Every single person using this system is has a personal life that is hopelessly screwed up.

3.) Usually, both of these are true.

Now I'm sure this is an unfair generalization, but I'll be damned if my spot-checking was able to find even a single deviation from the pattern.

Lemme see if this works...

I guess I should've known the people complaining about the interface were probably just calcified. I find it remarkably elegant for an HTML-based application. Cleanliness (graphically speaking) is by and large a forgotten virtue in this field, it seems. I've never seen a collection of timezones quite like that, though.

Obligatory first post.

I've wanted to learn Blogger's interface for a while. What better way than to try a bit of blogging?

To be quite honest, I heve neither a sufficiently-interesting life nor a sufficiently-public personality to justify a blog. Not to worry, though. my reading of various blogs tells me that this will hardly make me unique among the blogging set.