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01/25/2003 Archived Entry: "I can see clearly now - the rain has gone"

(for some reason I am singing this song today)

Today is Busyday (our adaptation of Saturday), where we always seem to have two things on the go. We just got out of a painfully hot shower and are on our way to help friends with a very small move (down the hall in their building). After that, a quick refresh back home and drop off the car so we can skytrain downtown to listen to irish music at the Blarney Stone in belated celebration of Jen's birthday. Not a thing bad about today, just Things To Do.

If you are near the Blarney Stone after 7:30, look for us and come say hi :)

Our English emoticons suck. They do not have near the expressiveness of Japanese emoticons. There is no way in our normal 'smileys' to show something like: ((((((^_^;) (leave sneakily...the extra brackets are movement marks and the semi-colon is the sign for 'sweating').

The Amazing Ebow is truly a geek invention for guitarists. It replaces something so basic (a pick) and creates such improvement, it's like replacing a notebook with a laptop. It's been around since the 70's and been used by all sorts of artists across a number of genres. I'd love to play with one for a bit to see if it's as good as they say it is.

Microsoft...well where should I begin. Last year they started an internal lock-down of new features until they could improve their focus on security. But they don't have the smarts to start with things like not allowing blank passwords on publicly available database servers. This doesn't even qualify as a hack...it's just taking advantage of a door that is wide open.....scratch that: a door that never even got put on the hinges in the doorframe. The traffic knocked 5 of the 13 rootservers (which handle the low-level conversion of human-readable names to computer-readable numbers) offline, thereby making large chunks of the internet unreachable. If I had my dithers, Microsoft would find itself against a class-action criminal negligence suit. Maybe then they would really take their bad security designs seriously.

Before you bit my head off: Yes, the developers of the exploit that takes advantage of this should be punished. I'm just saying that they shouldn't be the only ones punished.