Happy New Year...

Or What I Did On My Christmas Vacation.

We left our intrepid heroes beating Boris and Natasha with rolled up newspapers and rubbing their noses in it.

We now rejoin our heroes as they don ski flip flops.

We went and saw Eragon on the twenty mumble...the Thursday before Christmas...I could look it up, but I'm not gonna, so THERE! It actually wasn't a horrible movie. Despite jwz calling it as bad or worse than Dungeons and Dragons (the movie), it wasn't. I think he needs to quit swallowing anything his groupies hand him. D&D was a dreadful movie. Bad effects, horrible plotting, no characters worth noting, and total lack of direction. Eragon suffers from badly written source material (I haven't read the book, but enough people I know and trust have and they tell me that it's obvious that yes, it was written by a teenager, and it shows).

It's obvious that Eragon (the book and movie's main character gives name to both) is either a complete idiot or suffers from being a teenager. But I repeat myself. I pegged Jeremy Irons character for what he is about thirty seconds after he first appears on screen. It took Eragon half the movie to finally have his "duh" moment. John Malkovich is in this movie, but he's got about five minutes total time on screen. I think there's a blatant reference to every major fantasy setting ever written in there, but again, that's source material. My kid (who finished reading the book the day before we went and saw it) commented that the movie squished everything together (for an 8 year old, that's an acceptable description of plot compression). And yet, I don't feel like I missed anything. The story is a standard boy meets dragon, boy helped by mysterious old guy, boy saves world from evil ruler plot.

Total fluff, but well done fluff. I was entertained and didn't feel like I wanted my 1.5 hours of my life back.

Friday was work, but not really. I mean, sure, I WENT to work, but aside from assuring everything was in order for my ten days away to be frantic phone call about the entire network failing catastrophicly free, I just coasted until the office party. That killed the afternoon and I then officially left work for a nice break.

Saturday morning was an uneventful drive to Connecticut.

The next few days were spent chilllin' with robeli's family, and doing the whole Christmas thing. There's a newly renovated Marriott Courtyard on Yale's border (the Yale bookstore is about half a block up and across the street). If you ever have occasion to stay there, make sure your room doesn't face the street. New Haven never sleeps, and all night long they like to shoot at each other. Not in that part of town, but the sirens NEVER STOPPED (St. Raphael hospital is just a few blocks west, and the main approach is Whalley, which our room had a delightful view of). Our first night there? Three separate shootings. In fact, I think someone got shot in New Haven every night we were there except for Christmas proper. Lovely little city.

It's actually very sad driving through New Haven and West Haven heading in to Orange. Those houses are these big (even by modern standards, these houses are big) old early 1900s Victorians. When they were built, it's obvious they were the homes of the highly affluent. Now they're all converted into multi apt. dwellings and are falling apart.

We drove home, again uneventfully, Wednesday night. I love uneventful drives.

We spent the next few days just hanging at home and relaxing.

And now I'm back at work.

Happy New Year...

Or What I Did On My Christmas Vacation.

We left our intrepid heroes beating Boris and Natasha with rolled up newspapers and rubbing their noses in it.

We now rejoin our heroes as they don ski flip flops.

We went and saw Eragon on the twenty mumble...the Thursday before Christmas...I could look it up, but I'm not gonna, so THERE! It actually wasn't a horrible movie. Despite jwz calling it as bad or worse than Dungeons and Dragons (the movie), it wasn't. I think he needs to quit swallowing anything his groupies hand him. D&D was a dreadful movie. Bad effects, horrible plotting, no characters worth noting, and total lack of direction. Eragon suffers from badly written source material (I haven't read the book, but enough people I know and trust have and they tell me that it's obvious that yes, it was written by a teenager, and it shows).

It's obvious that Eragon (the book and movie's main character gives name to both) is either a complete idiot or suffers from being a teenager. But I repeat myself. I pegged Jeremy Irons character for what he is about thirty seconds after he first appears on screen. It took Eragon half the movie to finally have his "duh" moment. John Malkovich is in this movie, but he's got about five minutes total time on screen. I think there's a blatant reference to every major fantasy setting ever written in there, but again, that's source material. My kid (who finished reading the book the day before we went and saw it) commented that the movie squished everything together (for an 8 year old, that's an acceptable description of plot compression). And yet, I don't feel like I missed anything. The story is a standard boy meets dragon, boy helped by mysterious old guy, boy saves world from evil ruler plot.

Total fluff, but well done fluff. I was entertained and didn't feel like I wanted my 1.5 hours of my life back.

Friday was work, but not really. I mean, sure, I WENT to work, but aside from assuring everything was in order for my ten days away to be frantic phone call about the entire network failing catastrophicly free, I just coasted until the office party. That killed the afternoon and I then officially left work for a nice break.

Saturday morning was an uneventful drive to Connecticut.

The next few days were spent chilllin' with robeli's family, and doing the whole Christmas thing. There's a newly renovated Marriott Courtyard on Yale's border (the Yale bookstore is about half a block up and across the street). If you ever have occasion to stay there, make sure your room doesn't face the street. New Haven never sleeps, and all night long they like to shoot at each other. Not in that part of town, but the sirens NEVER STOPPED (St. Raphael hospital is just a few blocks west, and the main approach is Whalley, which our room had a delightful view of). Our first night there? Three separate shootings. In fact, I think someone got shot in New Haven every night we were there except for Christmas proper. Lovely little city.

It's actually very sad driving through New Haven and West Haven heading in to Orange. Those houses are these big (even by modern standards, these houses are big) old early 1900s Victorians. When they were built, it's obvious they were the homes of the highly affluent. Now they're all converted into multi apt. dwellings and are falling apart.

We drove home, again uneventfully, Wednesday night. I love uneventful drives.

We spent the next few days just hanging at home and relaxing.

And now I'm back at work.

Happy New Year...

Or What I Did On My Christmas Vacation.

We left our intrepid heroes beating Boris and Natasha with rolled up newspapers and rubbing their noses in it.

We now rejoin our heroes as they don ski flip flops.

We went and saw Eragon on the twenty mumble...the Thursday before Christmas...I could look it up, but I'm not gonna, so THERE! It actually wasn't a horrible movie. Despite jwz calling it as bad or worse than Dungeons and Dragons (the movie), it wasn't. I think he needs to quit swallowing anything his groupies hand him. D&D was a dreadful movie. Bad effects, horrible plotting, no characters worth noting, and total lack of direction. Eragon suffers from badly written source material (I haven't read the book, but enough people I know and trust have and they tell me that it's obvious that yes, it was written by a teenager, and it shows).

It's obvious that Eragon (the book and movie's main character gives name to both) is either a complete idiot or suffers from being a teenager. But I repeat myself. I pegged Jeremy Irons character for what he is about thirty seconds after he first appears on screen. It took Eragon half the movie to finally have his "duh" moment. John Malkovich is in this movie, but he's got about five minutes total time on screen. I think there's a blatant reference to every major fantasy setting ever written in there, but again, that's source material. My kid (who finished reading the book the day before we went and saw it) commented that the movie squished everything together (for an 8 year old, that's an acceptable description of plot compression). And yet, I don't feel like I missed anything. The story is a standard boy meets dragon, boy helped by mysterious old guy, boy saves world from evil ruler plot.

Total fluff, but well done fluff. I was entertained and didn't feel like I wanted my 1.5 hours of my life back.

Friday was work, but not really. I mean, sure, I WENT to work, but aside from assuring everything was in order for my ten days away to be frantic phone call about the entire network failing catastrophicly free, I just coasted until the office party. That killed the afternoon and I then officially left work for a nice break.

Saturday morning was an uneventful drive to Connecticut.

The next few days were spent chilllin' with robeli's family, and doing the whole Christmas thing. There's a newly renovated Marriott Courtyard on Yale's border (the Yale bookstore is about half a block up and across the street). If you ever have occasion to stay there, make sure your room doesn't face the street. New Haven never sleeps, and all night long they like to shoot at each other. Not in that part of town, but the sirens NEVER STOPPED (St. Raphael hospital is just a few blocks west, and the main approach is Whalley, which our room had a delightful view of). Our first night there? Three separate shootings. In fact, I think someone got shot in New Haven every night we were there except for Christmas proper. Lovely little city.

It's actually very sad driving through New Haven and West Haven heading in to Orange. Those houses are these big (even by modern standards, these houses are big) old early 1900s Victorians. When they were built, it's obvious they were the homes of the highly affluent. Now they're all converted into multi apt. dwellings and are falling apart.

We drove home, again uneventfully, Wednesday night. I love uneventful drives.

We spent the next few days just hanging at home and relaxing.

And now I'm back at work.

How not to fuck up your life...

One of my coworkers has found herself the victim of ID theft.

Most of you already know this, but a refresher never hurts:

1. Never click on a link in an email claiming to be from a bank or credit card company (also a bank, but a highly specialized one).

If you need to go to their web site, type it in manually, and keep it bookmarked for future use.

If your bank needs to talk to you, they'll call you, which brings us to our next item.

2. When your bank calls you, they won't ask for your account numbers, DOB, social, or any other personal info. They already have it.

They may ask you to verify your address and some other pieces of innocuous info. If you call them of course it's different, but you called them, so it's to be expected that they need a bit of info to look you up.

3. Scan those drives for viruses, worms, spyware, and adware.

There are some very nasty bits of malicious software out there that'll install themselves and hide themselves so you can't find them on the filesystem or the process list.

Those of you to whom this doesn't apply know who you are and I already know that Mac OS X, *BSD, Linux, and alternate browsers on Windows mitigate this. Thank you, now shut up.

4. Don't open random shit from people you don't know. Especially attachments. That's how the software in number three gets there in the first place (with some exceptions, there are holes IE that can be exploited so that just visiting the wrong site means you're fucked).

5. All those credit card offers you get as junk mail? Burn 'em, shred 'em, rip them into small pieces. Just make sure they can't be reassembled.

Yes, your card issuer, and I don't care who they are, has issued a card to a form filled out by someone other than the intended recipient. In some cases, those forms were taped together because the intended recipient didn't go far enough.

6. Put a real verbal password on your account without which changes cannot be made (including disallowing changes over the net). Your bank or card issuer will do this at your request.

You'd think it'd be the default, but despite fifty years of credit card and wire fraud, the banks still live in some dream world where your social and mother's maiden name aren't available to the whole world via the internet.

7. Think, goddamnit.

Use. Your. Brain.

If you decide to play the other side of the game and steal someone's ID, the FBI doesn't give a fuck about interstate bank and wire fraud unless it's fifty thousand or more (as my coworker found out). Steal small enough that the card issuer's don't care either, and believe me, they have a limit under which they'll just eat the cost because finding you and prosecuting costs them more than just abondoning the money.

How not to fuck up your life...

One of my coworkers has found herself the victim of ID theft.

Most of you already know this, but a refresher never hurts:

1. Never click on a link in an email claiming to be from a bank or credit card company (also a bank, but a highly specialized one).

If you need to go to their web site, type it in manually, and keep it bookmarked for future use.

If your bank needs to talk to you, they'll call you, which brings us to our next item.

2. When your bank calls you, they won't ask for your account numbers, DOB, social, or any other personal info. They already have it.

They may ask you to verify your address and some other pieces of innocuous info. If you call them of course it's different, but you called them, so it's to be expected that they need a bit of info to look you up.

3. Scan those drives for viruses, worms, spyware, and adware.

There are some very nasty bits of malicious software out there that'll install themselves and hide themselves so you can't find them on the filesystem or the process list.

Those of you to whom this doesn't apply know who you are and I already know that Mac OS X, *BSD, Linux, and alternate browsers on Windows mitigate this. Thank you, now shut up.

4. Don't open random shit from people you don't know. Especially attachments. That's how the software in number three gets there in the first place (with some exceptions, there are holes IE that can be exploited so that just visiting the wrong site means you're fucked).

5. All those credit card offers you get as junk mail? Burn 'em, shred 'em, rip them into small pieces. Just make sure they can't be reassembled.

Yes, your card issuer, and I don't care who they are, has issued a card to a form filled out by someone other than the intended recipient. In some cases, those forms were taped together because the intended recipient didn't go far enough.

6. Put a real verbal password on your account without which changes cannot be made (including disallowing changes over the net). Your bank or card issuer will do this at your request.

You'd think it'd be the default, but despite fifty years of credit card and wire fraud, the banks still live in some dream world where your social and mother's maiden name aren't available to the whole world via the internet.

7. Think, goddamnit.

Use. Your. Brain.

If you decide to play the other side of the game and steal someone's ID, the FBI doesn't give a fuck about interstate bank and wire fraud unless it's fifty thousand or more (as my coworker found out). Steal small enough that the card issuer's don't care either, and believe me, they have a limit under which they'll just eat the cost because finding you and prosecuting costs them more than just abondoning the money.

How not to fuck up your life...

One of my coworkers has found herself the victim of ID theft.

Most of you already know this, but a refresher never hurts:

1. Never click on a link in an email claiming to be from a bank or credit card company (also a bank, but a highly specialized one).

If you need to go to their web site, type it in manually, and keep it bookmarked for future use.

If your bank needs to talk to you, they'll call you, which brings us to our next item.

2. When your bank calls you, they won't ask for your account numbers, DOB, social, or any other personal info. They already have it.

They may ask you to verify your address and some other pieces of innocuous info. If you call them of course it's different, but you called them, so it's to be expected that they need a bit of info to look you up.

3. Scan those drives for viruses, worms, spyware, and adware.

There are some very nasty bits of malicious software out there that'll install themselves and hide themselves so you can't find them on the filesystem or the process list.

Those of you to whom this doesn't apply know who you are and I already know that Mac OS X, *BSD, Linux, and alternate browsers on Windows mitigate this. Thank you, now shut up.

4. Don't open random shit from people you don't know. Especially attachments. That's how the software in number three gets there in the first place (with some exceptions, there are holes IE that can be exploited so that just visiting the wrong site means you're fucked).

5. All those credit card offers you get as junk mail? Burn 'em, shred 'em, rip them into small pieces. Just make sure they can't be reassembled.

Yes, your card issuer, and I don't care who they are, has issued a card to a form filled out by someone other than the intended recipient. In some cases, those forms were taped together because the intended recipient didn't go far enough.

6. Put a real verbal password on your account without which changes cannot be made (including disallowing changes over the net). Your bank or card issuer will do this at your request.

You'd think it'd be the default, but despite fifty years of credit card and wire fraud, the banks still live in some dream world where your social and mother's maiden name aren't available to the whole world via the internet.

7. Think, goddamnit.

Use. Your. Brain.

If you decide to play the other side of the game and steal someone's ID, the FBI doesn't give a fuck about interstate bank and wire fraud unless it's fifty thousand or more (as my coworker found out). Steal small enough that the card issuer's don't care either, and believe me, they have a limit under which they'll just eat the cost because finding you and prosecuting costs them more than just abondoning the money.

Note on previous:

Of course the list isn't exhaustive. It's what I came up with on the fly.

It's a question of risk management deciding what steps to take and how much locking down of accounts to do.

There are other things to be said about online shopping as well.

Note on previous:

Of course the list isn't exhaustive. It's what I came up with on the fly.

It's a question of risk management deciding what steps to take and how much locking down of accounts to do.

There are other things to be said about online shopping as well.

Note on previous:

Of course the list isn't exhaustive. It's what I came up with on the fly.

It's a question of risk management deciding what steps to take and how much locking down of accounts to do.

There are other things to be said about online shopping as well.