Toad Sucking Non-Sycophants

In the same vein as the previous post, I also ran across this on a year-end weird list:

The Dog Who Loved to Suck on Toads

He's apparently in re-lab now. (Okay, Lady is not a lab but I couldn't resist the lowest possible form of humor.)

100 things you didn't know...

I stumbled across this on slashdot yesterday and was so engrossed I thought I'd share it:

100 Things We Didn't Know Last Year


and here's a few of these goodies:

7. The Cowardly Lion Suit is made of real lion.

40. The medical name for the part of the brain associated with teenage sulking is "superior temporal sulcus".

68. The egg came first (I've always used this argument....)

86. Six million people use TV subtitles, despite having no hearing impairment. (And, since I've some lossage, I'm not really in this group, though I suspect a lot of these folks are in hearing impaired denial.)

and ...

100. In the 1960s, the CIA used to watch Mission Impossible to get ideas about spying..... (along with everyone else....)

and along these lines, I got a short little trivia book for Christmas: That's A Fact Jack! It's not the best trivia book ever but does have a few memorable items:

1. Edison invented the tattoo gun.
2. "The Whole Nine Yards", refers to unloading 27 feet of machine gun bullets on a target...
3. Mr. Potato was the first TV commercial.\
4. Little holes in leather shoes are not for ventilation, rather they are drains.... invented for wingtips used in boggy, soggy parts of the world.
   

Windows Vista -- DOA, rather, killing on arrival

This post by security expert Peter Gutmann is frightening in its assessment of the impact and underlying philosophy of Microsoft Vista.

Consider a medical IT worker who's using a medical imaging PC while listening to audio/video played back by the computer (the CDROM drives installed in workplace PCs inevitably spend most of their working lives playing music or MP3 CDs to drown out workplace noise). If there's any premium content present in there, the image will be subtly altered by Vista's content protection,
potentially creating exactly the life-threatening situation that the medical
industry has worked so hard to avoid.

The type and degree of lock-in described in the article is utterly frightening, harkening back to the Ma Bell days.

The Grinch

Another quick post:

Yes, we're the grinch family--we have once again procrastinated to the extent that we've stolen a bit of Christmas from our friends and families and ourselves. We all did our local family shopping yesterday, since along with the blizzard, the boys have been sick in bed all week. They actually were fairly well recovered yesterday so we joined the masses and the clueless for our first day of shopping this holiday season....

Those of you out there in Webland will realize that we haven't sent you anything... yet.... but hope to do so prior to the start of school on January 8th.

(So, this is less of a blog now and more of an open family letter of lame excuses.) :(

Ho Ho Ho and lots of Snow

Well, unless you're a troll in a dungeon somewhere, you know it snowed here in Loveland this week--mostly sideways snow. This recent storm really reminded me of Wyoming. Fortunately though, we had nowhere we had to be....

There are thousands of pix on the web of the Blizzard of 2006, but here's my small contribution anyway....

vmplayer

I struggled and struggled to get a "blank" vmplayer appliance built.

All of the on-line tools say how simple it is, just:
qemu-img create -f raw -O vmdk outfile.vmdk 2G
and create a default/typical vmx (or use vmbuilder).

Unfortunately, doing all that with an install ISO just flat out wasn't working. The blank vmware screen would appear after a while (the Black Screen of Boredom) and it never got beyond that.

After rebuilding vmdks, vmxs, moving symlinks to physical files, nothing would work.....

Finally, I thought about hitting the delete key and changing the boot option order... yep, that did the trick. I had to move CDROM to be the first boot option. (Odd because I thought it would be by default based on all of the other entry information I had come across.....)

Odds & Ends

I should mention that there is a blog available from Spencer already. See swampnotes for more info....

Cool stuff from killing time in the last day or two:

• Carla Schroder writes linux technology in a very consumable way.

• POTC2 technology is enlightening and entertaining--basically the "Special Features" you'd typically see in a second DVD but on-line. There's also a video you can download. (Why are people calling videos podcasts now? ....)

Getting A Late Start

Okay,
This is a lame and late attempt at entering the blogosphere. The dowdberry's are now officially on-line... again....