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  • In which I learn, again, why math is bad for me.

    written by

    james

    So I’ve been doing the college thing the last while. Well, sort of. It’s more like I’ve been doing the prerequisit education before I can do the college thing. And that’s meant several months of pretty much all math, all the time. Because until I’ve nearly melted my brain with numbers, letters, and letters that try and become numbers, I won’t be getting through the door into something slightly more useful. And what I’ve discovered when trying to avoid completely frying my last brain cell–at least until I’ve managed to put this hot mess behind me, at which point it can do all the frying it likes–is, quite simply, I was not built to tolerate highschool math.

    Well, okay, that may or may not be entirely fair. Probably more accurate is I was not built to tolerate all highschool math and nothing but highschool math. But either way. The way this course is laid out, one of two things is pretty much guaranteed to happen. Either I’m going to find myself exceedingly bored, and still come away with decent to high marks on a huge pile of junk I’ve done before even if I don’t straight up remember it right away–this is how I spent most of my time with this course, or it’ll sit there waiting until I’ve turned my head for 3 seconds and suckerpunch me in the face with something obvious that sends me around the twist for an hour or so while I attempt to figure out how it is, exactly, a thing that made sense 5 minutes ago became a tangled mess of what in creation was I thinking–this has been a more recent development.

    Needless to say I’m discovering, sometimes the hard way, my own limitations in translating all manner of equasions that are supposed to represent actual, visual shapes into something moderately useable in an honest to goodness math problem. And, at the same time, discovering–probably not for the first time–exactly why it is my first instinct when I was actually, you know, in highschool was to get me the hell out of dodge and find a way up that didn’t mean staring at a graph and trying to figure out which of the 80 million points the thing represents is actually supposed to stand in for x.

    On the positive side, at least, the people are awesome. Not quite so enthused about the new instructor (*), but you’ll have that. And the material, for the most part, at least tries to be vaguely useful. If math was something I had an interest in in the first place, like for instance if I were actually planning on doing something I knew would heavily depend on it, I’d probably be a little quicker with actually catching it. But since math and I were never on speaking terms, and the program I intend to get into doesn’t actually look like it has a whole lot to do with math beyond the first semester, I look away from the thing for 3 seconds and suckerpunch. So that’s been just distracting enough to keep me out of trouble, and is probably partially contributing to my continued descent into chaos and madness. It may or may not also be partly to blame for a virtual lack in, well, pretty much anything else that requires any kind of creative energy. maybe not, but it gets the blame anyway.

    I do like how they’ve set the program up, though. You’re escentially supervised, but can largely go at your own pace (**). There are expectations, naturally, and fairly loose deadlines. You’re not really handing in assignments or anything–the only things you’re actually graded on in this program are your tests. It’s sort of like a correspondence course meets an adult learning center, or something along those lines. Which works for me, for a couple reasons. It gets me out of the house for a few hours a day, which isn’t a bad thing. Plus, because it’s largely a DIY deal, you’re not spending your entire class time listening to the instructor drone on about the finer points of graphing a polynomial function–which, just for the record, is only slightly higher on the snore scale than actually attempting to graph the offending polynomial function. Which has the added benefit of you can use said class time to, well, actually do the work. Highschools could probably learn a thing or three from this program overall, I’d imagine.

    Barring a natural–or mental–disaster of one variety or another, I figure I’ll be well on my way to finished by late July or hopefully early August. That’ll give me a few months to recover and focus on getting me ready to start the actual program–I applied a couple weeks ago now, but I probably won’t actually be accepted until August anyway. If all goes well, that whole process should end up being a formality. Then, I can start getting right back to handling things I didn’t think need handling when I was mucking about with junk the first time. And even if this program ends up giving me a headache, actually being able to say that for real, and mean it, sure as hell won’t suck. I just may be required to singlehandedly keep the caffeine industry afloat until then. I don’t mind if they don’t.

    (*): It’s a do it yourself deal, so there’s not really a whole lot of actual instructing going on. She’s more like a supervisor. Babysitter, really. Making sure everyone who’s supposed to be there actually, you know, shows up there, that kind of thing. You can usually bounce things off her if you’re stuck, so I guess to that end the instructor label fits. But pretty sure it’s a stretch.

    (**): The government usually has an idea of how long it should, under ideal circumstances, take you to finish a course or section of a course. So the program uses that as kind of a benchmark to figure out if you might need a little nudge or two to get yourself back in gear. But for the most part, if you’re not seen to be falling behind that benchmark, they tend to leave you alone about deadlines and junk. Or, at least, they do if you’re me.

  • Here’s your sign, the sequel.

    written by

    james

    Remember me? You know, the guy that says he’s done with this whole radio silence thing and then falls off the blogging cliff for half of forever? Yeah. Hi.

    Remember her? If not, I’ll remind you. She thought it might be fun to take the sidewalk in order to bypass a school bus. The judge she ended up in front of, well, didn’t. And for her efforts, she was handed an idiot sign.

    Fast forward a good while. That self same judge is still doing his thing over there in Cleveland. And along comes Richard Dameron to take his turn at it. This particularly pleasant fellow called 911 with threatening the cops in mind. So as a repayment, Judge Awesome ordered him to park himself outside a police station carrying his own idiot sign.

    “Actually, I didn’t want to do it,” Dameron told Fox. “But the judge said to do it, so I am going to be the man and stand up.”

    Dameron was convicted of threatening officers in 911 calls.

    “I was being an idiot and it will never happen again,” says the sign.

    I’m long past having any hope this’ll set an example for the next one–I think I sort of thought that about little miss sidewalk, too. But I’m willing to take bets on whether Lugnut over there picked anything up on it. Although, reading that someone’s managed to put together a collection of these might be moderately more entertaining…

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  • The only Heartbleed left now is the NSA.

    written by

    james

    So pretty much everything exploded this week. If you were paying attention, you were probably warned not to go near things like your online banking site, or pretty damn near anything that advertises itself as having a secure connection. This is because of a pretty lethal bug in the software that provides that secure connection, in several cases, that pretty well rendered your secure connection worse than no security at all. There’s a pretty nice, if a little technical, explanation for it written up by the guys I’m paying for the use of this server, but the cliff notes version is the hole’s a few years old, and can provide someone who knows what they’re doing with access to pretty much any information stored in the memory of a server with the buggy software. So if someone knew how to take advantage of that security hole, they could potentially have access to usernames, passwords, creditcard numbers–basicly anything that happened to be in that server’s memory at the time.

    There’s an updated version of that software in the wild now that plugs this security hole (note: not that anything on the server uses secure connections at the moment but I’m running that updated software now anyway), so as people get around to applying it that should be much less of a holy hell what in creation have I done kind of problem. Which is awesome, for guys like you and me. A little less awesome, though, for guys like the NSA.

    The internet is still reeling from the discovery of the Heartbleed bug, and yesterday we wondered if the NSA knew about it and for how long. Today, Bloomberg is reporting that the agency did indeed know about Heartbleed for at least the past two years, and made regular use of it to obtain passwords and data.

    While it’s not news that the NSA hunts down and utilizes vulnerabilities like this, the extreme nature of Heartbleed is going to draw more scrutiny to the practice than ever before. As others have noted, failing to reveal the bug so it could be fixed is contrary to at least part of the agency’s supposed mission:

    Ordinary Internet users are ill-served by the arrangement because serious flaws are not fixed, exposing their data to domestic and international spy organizations and criminals, said John Pescatore, director of emerging security trends at the SANS Institute, a Bethesda, Maryland-based cyber-security training organization.

    “If you combine the two into one government agency, which mission wins?” asked Pescatore, who formerly worked in security for the NSA and the U.S. Secret Service. “Invariably when this has happened over time, the offensive mission wins.”

    So when the smoke clears, the NSA will have at least a little bit less access to John Q. User’s data–at least until they end up mandating another hole in some other layer of security software. But until then, it looks like the fine folks at stalker central will end up being the only ones dealing with a case of heartbleed when it’s all done and dusted. Now if it was only that easy to switch off the exploits they helped introduce.

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  • Stick a fork in this one. He’s done.

    written by

    james

    I can’t honestly look in the mirror and say I’ve heard it all, but I can at least say I’ve heard a goodly chunk of it. I don’t think, when the expression “stick a fork in it” was invented, the folks doing the inventing particularly had their minds all that close to the gutter. I mean, I could be wrong–sexual twists have been around for probably very nearly as long as sex, so it’s entirely possible. Or, at least, if it wasn’t before, it is now.

    An elderly Australian man ended up in hospital after he jammed an entire 10 cm fork inside his penis for “sexual gratification.”

    The bizarre medical emergency at Canberra Hospital was outlined in a paper in the International Journal of Surgery Case Reports.

    “A 70-year-old man presents to the emergency department with a bleeding urethral meatus following self-insertion of a fork into the urethra to achieve sexual gratification. Multiple retrieval methods were contemplated with success achieved via forceps traction and copious lubrication,” the paper reads.

    I’m trying to figure out which is more disturbing–that this actually happened, or that he wasn’t the first or only one to wander down that road the really, really wrong way. I’m also trying to imagine exactly how something like that could do anything other than, you know, hurt like hell. But then, some folks are into that kinda thing, so whichever. This particular folk, though? Yeah, he’s done. But hold the fork.

  • How I ended up firing Windows XP.

    written by

    james

    So for anyone who happens to be paying attention, april 7th is XP dies a death day. Microsoft has decided after what’s probably shot past the 10 year mark to drop support for the OS. Which, escentially, means if you’re still running that version of Windows, you’ve just officially volunteered your machine to play host to all manner of new and interesting malware creations–you have probably also had your spamming ass slammed by my oversensitive firewall, but that’s another story. Because it’s me, and because I never turn down an excuse to see how far I can stretch things until they break, my finally tossing XP wasn’t entirely a conscious “this needs to happen” type decision.

    I’ll freely admit I put off switching operating systems until almost the last minute. Largely it was lazyness–I have a crap ton and a half of stuff that needs moved from one OS to the next, and when the thought crossed my mind initially I was in the process of throwing together a multiple-part archive of pretty much all of it so the machine I was using at the time could be wiped for the upgrade. But other parts included things like I wasn’t entirely sure I wouldn’t be replacing the machine I was using a ways down the road, or I couldn’t 100% guarantee Windows 7, which is where I was planning to migrate to, would run on that machine–I figured it would, because the thing originally shipped with Vista, but Vista was also 7 years ago so that wasn’t exactly a very stable benchmark either. So I was alternating between holding out until I could find a new machine, and doing the occasional bit of digging to see if my machine would collapse under the OS or not.

    Things kind of happened in fairly short order after that. Plans developed that saw May getting herself a new machine, so the Windows system she was using–which at the time ran Windows 8 (don’t get me started)–sort of stopped having any actual use. My machine had started showing its age, and there was a point that I actually wasn’t entirely sure it’d last long enough for me to do what needed doing with it to keep my various crap from falling into system failure oblivion. Fine time for me to start experimenting with new backup systems, right? So I played around with that (that’s another entry), and managed to get things to a point where if the system spontaneously caught fire it wouldn’t do anything more than torch my corner of the office. Which, okay, would have sucked royally, but my stuff was safe.

    Okay. So that’s one headache down. Now I was comfortable enough that if the system decided to fry every circuit going, or if Microsoft decided to change their mind, pull support early and launch an update that escentially disabled every system in the place still running that OS, I wasn’t gonna be hurting too horribly bad. That made the next steps very nearly natural. Since May’s new machine was here and set up, May’s Windows machine became my Windows machine. Since I will never willingly use a Windows 8 machine for anything other than something new to put Windows 7 on, my next project became wipe the machine, and toss on an OS that doesn’t make me want to consider buying stock in migraine medication. I spent the next couple days manually rebuilding the machine, including hunting up wireless network drivers that I could have swore Windows 7 had built in when we bought that damn card. Then it was take a better part of the next week or so downloading and restoring the backup from the old machine, and my eventual turned emergency OS swap ended up happening with only the removal of a couple strands of hair.

    And for the last couple months or so, well before Microsoft flipped the switch what turns all your XP into hacker heaven–yes, this apparently may or may not include most ATM’s, I fired XP and haven’t looked back. I may kick myself for it in 6 months when I go looking for something I knew I had on the old machine and poof, it forgets to exist, but you’ll have that. And in future, I do believe I’ll start the upgrade process well in advance of potential catastrophic implosions. On the other hand, that was kinda fun. Perhaps I’ll do it again…

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  • For the hundredth time, enough of toronto’s walking circus already.

    written by

    james

    So for those of you living under a rock, toronto has its very own walking circus. That self same walking circus has decided it’s not done dragging the city down the pipes from a PR perspective, so it’s off to the races in its second shot at being mayor. And yet, the media doesn’t even really wanna talk about its second shot at being mayor. So instead, we get treated to things like its attendance at a Leafs game. Or when it decides to show up at a football game wearing the team’s jersey. Or when it gets told it’s not allowed into a lounge area–presumedly where there happens to be alcohol service–at the aforementioned Leafs game.

    Granted I don’t live in toronto, so wouldn’t have a dog in this fight regardless. But let’s draw some comparisons here, if we can. Quebec’s got themselves an election tomorrow. Ontario may or may not have itself an election between now and 2015. Canada’s got a federal election coming up in 2015, whether the government likes it or not. What we’re hearing from all of those corners, with maybe the exception of the federal one (more on that in another entry later), is the beginnings of actual election platforms–and, in Quebec, the plank by plank dismantling of the same. But in Toronto, the majority of the attention is focused on the circus–and not even because the circus is dangling a platform in front of our noses. Hell, even in situations where there’s a potential person to carry on the supposed politics started by the circus without the, you know, circus, we’re hearing less of a platform and more of a “This is what you shouldn’t be doing if you’re Toronto’s mayor.”. Which just about anyone with an ounce of common sense already knows, which is why this post refers to him as the circus and not, instead, as toronto’s current mayor.

    Okay, we get it. It’s a walking, talking, political bombshell. Some might even go so far as to say a public relations disaster if not a financial one. So why is the media (note: by the media, I don’t just mean the toronto Star–although they should probably be entitled to their own special place among the media by now) still eating all of this up? If the circus is at a hockey game, the media should be following someone like, let’s say, Olivia Chow around instead–and maybe somehow managing to coax something that vaguely resembles how she intends to pay for yet another local transit brainstorm. Or see if John Tory can give something for the opinion pages aside from his code of conduct. Like, you know, an election platform. I’d even settle, grudgingly, for more about Sarah Thomson, if I must. Just please, for the love of anything and everything sane, enough about the circus already. The reruns are killing me.

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  • Finally. A solid test case for the ‘Stupid Tax’.

    written by

    james

    When I actually had a job what paid me, part of that job involved charging people who didn’t have the support plan they needed for me to actually, you know, support them. My manager at the time, in some of those cases, called it a stupid tax. Not necessarily because folks were stupid to pay it, but because 9 times in 10, the reason they were calling in was a direct result of their own stupidity–like, say, let’s click on this random Facebook link from a guy who never talks to me, because viruses are pretty. I thought the only people who employed such logic were the folks I worked with. Nope, apparently not. It’s also a thing if you happen to be a debt collector of the drug variety.

    While the outcome of the confrontation was one man dying in a parking lot and two suffering bullet wounds as bystanders ran for cover, a notebook found at the scene reveals the collector’s odd street code of conduct.

    He kept a handwritten tally of debts, grievances and fines like a principal tracking schoolyard discipline: One cohort was charged $1,000 as a “stupid tax” and fined $1,000 “for having that chick stop by.” A debt was increased for “pissing me off” and fines were “double when you don’t pay or couldn’t do your job,” the notes said, as detailed in a court ruling this week.

    And in reading half of that, at least one person will ask. Did this guy happen to know a one-time roommate of mine? So now we’ve got probably the first ever solidified test case for the implementation of the stupid tax. I wonder if he ever actually had it paid…

  • Fifty shades of gone.

    written by

    james

    So I take an age and a half off blogging, again, and that’s the best thing I can come up with? See also: why I shouldn’t take an age and a half off blogging. But since I did, and then I came up with this, I might as well do something useful with it. How about highlighting why it is you shouldn’t take seriously everything you read? Because clearly, taking everything you read as seriously as people in London clearly do results in a call to the fire department because you wanted your very own Fifty Shades of Grey award. The fire department, however, strongly recommends that maybe you should just not.

    “I don’t know whether it’s the Fifty Shades effect, but the number of incidents involving items like handcuffs seems to have gone up,” said Third Officer Dave Brown. “I’m sure most people will be Fifty Shades of red by the time our crews arrive to free them.”

    Since 2010, London firefighters have treated almost 500 people with rings stuck on their fingers, nine with rings stuck on their penises, and one man with his penis stuck in a toaster.

    Rescue crews also helped five people with hands stuck in shredders and 17 children with their hands trapped in toys.

    And now we know where today’s education system has lead us. For future reference, when the general rule is “do not try this at home”, they’re probably not kidding. Then again, I suspect neither is the guy with the toaster wang–anymore. Any guesses how many shades of gone in the head you’d need to be to consider some of these an option? I’ll give you 50.

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  • Bad idea: coming away with $20000000 worth of tax fraud success. Worse idea: advertising it.

    written by

    james

    If it wasn’t for people like Rashia Wilson, I would have a very boring Sunday. Or at least I’d have one less reason to be sitting here snickering. She was probably Tampa’s most successful tax cheat, draining enough money from the government that throwing a $30000 birthday party for her daughter, who wasn’t even old enough to really appreciate it I’m sure, was as trivial to her as running off to the store and buying a case of pop would be to anyone who actually made money the somewhat honest way. Or at least she was, until she stood atop Facebook and declared herself officially the queen of tax fraud. Her highness was granted a reception more than befitting her status, and 21 years of solid servitude. Funny thing, that. Seems no one told her it’d be her doing the serving. But I’m sure that was a minor oversight.

  • Ottawa loses its mind. Again.

    written by

    james

    One of the things I miss when I’m behind on things is local braindeadness. Particularly local braindeadness to the tune of let’s screw with traffic more than normal because speeders. So I missed it when Ottawa’s council decided it would be a mighty fine idea to experiment last summer.

    People don’t like to slow down in residential areas. This is a problem not just in Ottawa by any means. But Ottawa has decided to take it to new, interesting and quite probably moronic levels. Rather than posting signs warning of the speed limit on residential streets on, you know, the side of the road where–really, who knew–signs of any variety belong, they’ve decided they’d be more beneficial if they were right smack in the middle.

    Now, I haven’t seen any major headlines of massive pile-ups on some of these streets where that was going on, but I’ll let you just rifle through any number of the several million possible scenarios wherein this proves to be an absolute dog of an idea. The signs were supposedly spring-loaded, so they could right themselves should a driver end up running them down, which tells me they’ve at least entertained the idea of one of those scenarios already. And yet, this is still a thing.

    They say if the experiment goes well, they’ll make a return to doing exactly that starting this spring and on more streets. I love this city, don’t get me wrong, but christ jesus could we maybe talk about something that takes a tiny bit more thought? Like, let’s say, an actual police presence on problem streets? You know that expression there’s never a cop around when you need one? For validation of this expression, consult this brainstorm. Although I suppose if an accident is born out of some driver not expecting a sign to be straight in his path, that’d be one way of solving that problem, at least. But I kind of figured our government would be slightly better at not just replacing that problem with a higher priority one. That’ll learn me.

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