David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
A friend asked me why I stick with my Royals yesterday. Actually he pointed at my Royals hat and scoffed, “Why would anyone waste money on that?”
I thought about that a lot.
He’s a New York buy-whatever-it-takes-to-win-the-pennant Yankees fan. He’s not even from New York. He grew up in Iowa and Texas. What’s the fun in rooting for a team when you already know in Spring Training what will happen in October? Read more
I went to polish up my video last night–it needed a soundtrack and some title screens, and a couple of scenes flickered so I needed to fix that–and I found a nice black Plextor 40X CD burner sitting on the Darth Vader-colored Dell workstation we use to edit tape.
I’ll bet you already know how this story ends. Read more
I see that Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the now-convicted mastermind behind the abduction, imprisonment and killing of Daniel Pearl, has been sentenced to death by hanging by a Pakistani court.
Sheikh’s lawyer called the penalty “unjust and harsh.” Read more
When someone e-mails you or a group of people asking you to pray for still another person, just do what the person asks and don’t start rumormongering, OK?
I heard of an incident recently (if you want to assume I was involved in it somehow, go ahead) where a longtime friend e-mailed a group of people s/he thought trustworthy and knew prayed on a regular basis. S/he gave some details about the situation. I won’t go into them. I’ll just say there were a few taboos involved. The person who was suffering from the problem didn’t want this to be common knowledge. Read more
I’m tired. I got home from work at arbout 4:45 and immediately started writing up a study for Friday night. I had about an hour before I really needed to leave… Well, at 6:15, I mostly had the study written. I’m GenX to the bone.
The study went well. We split into two groups and I had one of my partners in crime, Jon Schmidt, take the other one. He muddled through my notes. Since the study could go in a lot of different directions (we talked about generational sins and demonic influence–yes, I am a sucker for controversy) I literally put together twice as much as we needed, so we’d be able to go either direction. I could tell from hearing Jon that he indeed went a very different direction than I did. But both went well. Read more
I remember when the All-Star Game actually mattered.
Well, it didn’t matter–it was still a game that didn’t count, but the guys who showed up, they showed up to play. There was a lot of pride at stake. My first All-Star memory was the 1983 game. The American League hadn’t won a game in years. Then the California Angels’ Fred Lynn came up with the bases loaded, smacked one out of the park for the first-ever All-Star grand slam, and carried the AL to victory.
These days, the only purpose the All-Star Game serves is to give Baseball Commissionerwannabe Bud Selig another opportunity to make a fool of himself. Read more
I ran into a problem yesterday with a VPN client not working in XP. After a Usenet search, someone suggested that removing the QoS client (which does nothing useful anyway) fixes the problem about 80% of the time. In my case, that worked.
If something networking-related isn’t working right in WinXP for you, try removing the QoS client and see what happens. At the very least, you’ll speed up networking slightly, and at best, you’ll fix the problem.
I’ve had arguments at work with one of the managers as to whether Linux is up to the task of running an enterprise-class Web server. When I mention my record with Linux running this site, the manager dismisses it, never mind that this site gets more traffic than a lot of the sites we run at work. So I went looking this afternoon for some sites that run on Linux, Apache, and PHP, like this one does.
I found a bunch of small-timers. Read more
I spent some time preparing a new web server. It’s minimalist. I hope it’ll do the job. If not, hardware’s cheap, and this server’s doing a job that needs to be done. I really need to run this blog on something other than my main workstation. But there’s another reason.
Soon, I’ll be bringing another blog online. Not written by me. I don’t do this for just anybody, but this isn’t just anybody. I won’t say much, because I don’t know yet what it’s going to look like, but this person has the most important message of anyone I know right now, and will hopefully use this new forum to share that message. So that blog’s going online, even if it means I have to go buy a little hardware. I’m always willing to go spend a little money for a good reason. Read more
I guess this is as good of a time as any to write my spiritual autobiography. It’s not as long of a story as some–years of apathy have ways of shortening stories.
I guess I could sum up my current state in a couple of lines: Reach the world. Work within the system and change it from within.
Here’s how I got there. Read more