I just can't get over this article... seriously, the loops of logic and hilarity seem to be endless.

I have an OpenBSD firewall to build tomorrow, that should be fun and stuff. I'm quite sick, again. I don't think I ever fully recovered from the last cold. I took some cold medicine around 8 and slept until 2ish. That stuff is hardcore. Sorry if you called me and I was dead.

So, mutating that to the reality that is my life... when I say "reality" I mean communicating just as much by digital as by analog means. Sometimes more, usually more indepth. I'm Sherrod D, lousing with technology. This produces the "good on internet" guy. You never really know if he's googling everything he's talking to you about, or checks imdb to make sure his witty references are both obscure and accurate. The internet artificially eradicates hundreds of incompatibility issues.

What made me start thinking about this? James Willard.

Speaking of being damned. I love "Blood and Splendor." Hitler was a vegetarian. Ivan the Terrible was a pious, praying, religious fanatic who raped hundreds of women and killed hundreds of thousands of people. One of whom was his own son. Do you know what made him insane? He had a horrible childhood of being ignored and subjected to brutal violence and neglect. But, at 13 he stood up to the people who didn't notice him and made them respect him. A few years later he met his first wife, she had a son. She was a kind, compassionate, intelligent woman who made his life of hell into heaven. The book uses the word 'idyllic' - a word I love - to describe that time in his life. So, how did he commute from a happy, loving husband, father and ruler to a crazed mad man who slaughtered entire cities?
She got sick and died.

I'm not sure how much longer I can pretend to believe. "Other people don't make you happy" is wearing incredibly thin. Because we all know they make us miserable and insane. Why can't they make us happy too?

Also, its apparently not very many degrees outside. I, however am craving a holiday cookiedough ice cream shake from 31 unf!

And work we are. I have to reinstall PN on the ag.com server. Patty is going be my geekgirlfriend and help out with admin stuff, Butch is going to get the kids organized to generate content. Lots to be done. But, the new version is worth it to me. I'm not even going to attempt an upgrade, but go ahead and reinstall Phoenix. Woo hoo.

Filesharing, "piracy" and Intellectual Property law breaking will never end. I don't care how many safeguards or little scams the corporations try to invoke to protect their precious digital media and the royalties that go with it. It just won't work. Why? Because there are thousands upon thousands of genius programmers out there just begging for the opportunity to break their shit. That's the bottom line - the geeks with the bugged out eyes, chugging coffee at 4am, staring at a million lines of code will ALWAYS be better, faster and more determined than any of these corporations. Simply because geeks have a higher motivation than money. They seek knowledge, adventure and the bragging rights to cracking things open. I know tons of coders. Genius coders - guys who nonchalantly recommend writing my own drivers when my video card isn't supported in Linux. Seriously.

We all know I'm not a coder. I constantly voice my awe at these guys and girls who can sort out hundreds of variables, classes and operations in their head. They amaze me. I do however feel 100% comfortable administering a webserver. Its cake. Doing the admin and security for a webserver, even one with downloads, dynamic content and user info updating is not difficult. It becomes difficult when those in charge make bad choices. Choices such as IIS. IIS has been damned by all of the top security advisory organizations. Its a joke. But the riaa still makes that bad choice. I've learned in life that if you continually make bad choices... well, you get hacked.

Lots of people joke - myself included - "Riaa IT dept is staffed by idiots, I should send them a resume." But we all know it got that way by management making bad decisions and not trusting the knowledge and experience of just about every respectable IT person there is. This is really the perfect example of completely unacceptable and ignorant security policies. Or probably no security policies at all. And by lacking proper policies, the riaa has gone not only from a joke to hackers and IT dorks, but also a joke to the world at large.

Getting hacked once, you investigate, make changes and lock things down for the future. You hang your head in embarrassment, but you go on. Getting hacked 7 times in 6 months, you might as well commit ritual seppuku. Its really the only honorable thing to do.

It makes all the other horrible aspects of my life seem bearable. I just set it on my desk and stare at it lovingly. I feel guilt for not using it to its full potential. I want to take it everywhere with me - and secretly do. In fact, its not been more that 10 feet from me since I got it. I wonder if anyone has noticed.

I played with the digital camera a lot last night, trying out all the different modes and making little movies and stuff. I made a new wallpaper thing for olly. He sometimes gets neglected in the "reet and fancy" dept. Have a screenshot. Photoshop is the biggest piece of crap. I can't believe people like that thing. Apop is totally right. I haven't had a chance to customize flux very much lately. Its hanging when I startx. I wish I could have KDE. I read this article about their newdocms file browsing system and I totally drooled. I want to try it! WAH! Someday I will have all the delicious KDE my little heart desires. Sigh. I hate the MS "windowmanager". There is a special feature which I would really love MS to implement. I'm totally serious. Its very simple, and I need it. Why do they hate me? I feel the love from the BSD and even the linux community, but MS is so very adversarial. Its like they want me to be miserable.

I had a really fun night, eventhough I didn't get my shoelaces. Amy says to try Target 'cause "Target has awesome shoelaces!" I need big fat white ones for my Vans, cause I have urban flava like Justin. I got to hang out with the kids tonight and Butch and I went to get food and search for velcro and my laces.

Something for Brian - part of the 1978 collection. Amazing and beautiful. I love her.