Earthquakes and Glowing Water
The ride in CA is definitely been a little bumpy lately...First it was this one at a little after 8am last Sunday:
Magnitude 5.2 - SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA 2005 June 12 15:41:46 UTC
Which Tracy and I both felt. Pretty good little jolt and a few sec of aftershocks. We both jumped up to look outside and see if the pool was shaking. It wasn't.
And last night we had this:
Magnitude 7.2 - OFF THE COAST OF NORTHERN CALIFORNIA 2005 June 15 02:50:54 UTC
Which came with a Tsunami warning for the entire Pacific coast. And people screaming on the beach and evacuated/shut down communities. We had gone down to the to have dinner and watch the Dinoflagellate bioluminescence with some friends. Our waiter came out and said that there was a Tsunami warning. Idiots in the street were shouting it. Dude, we were 300 something feet above sea level. It'd have to be a meteor impact off the coast of San Diego to affect us. People were acting silly.
This is what it looked like:
Oh the horror!
And then 25 minutes later, it was cancelled. Heh.
But the bioluminescent dinoflagellate were coooool. The waves were crashing and creating a neat blue light each time. Tracy and I went down to investigate even closer and didn't find much. We headed back up the trail only to find a skunk in our path. Which promptly chased us with it's huge black and white tail in the air. So we walked over a (*#$%ing) mile up to Swami's to go around it. As we were about to head up the steps at swami's, a couple told us that there were tide pools that were glowing like crazy...so we investigated that.
We noticed that as we walked, we were leaving glowing footprints in the sand. So cool. You could tap the ground and it would light up. You could tap the water in the tide pools and it would fan out like lightning bolts. Running your hands around on the rocks (covered in algae) would leave trails. It was so bright and so neat. Highly recommend going out to see this. More on it here.
Invalid user guest from 62.193.142.170
Subject: Re: Breakin Attempts
Our computer seems to be hacked in, so we are currently locked out from it.
I will see to it, that the computer is disabled asap,
and the means of entrance into the system discovered.
Thanks for the report,
Nenad Peric
system administrator
Sinfonika d.o.o.
Belgrade
Neat. At least there'll be one less jackass script kiddie bot probing ssh all over the freaking place.
I used to report these all the time back when I was a sysadmin at a small ISP. I get reports of the logs on our servers daily and process anything from our customers and send it off to various organizations' abuse contact. It was far more effective to actually call people than it was to send e-mail. But that was before spammers would relentlessly call any number listed in whois. And back when most of the own3d machines were from the US. I don't plan on calling Belgradeto report a script kiddie. Once, I got a page that our NetApp had just reached 100%. Apparently some kid at UCSD had found a customer's open ftp account and had uploaded 8G of w@r3z games. I reported him like usual. The admin was nice and said the account had been suspended etc etc. About a month later I got a call from the FBI wanting to know the monetary cost of the 'hack attempt'. We came up with a small number to give to them. I talked to the agent and she said that the kid that did it was a student and had been kicked out of school and that her job was to gather evidence for his court appearance. Wow! I guess UCSD took that pretty seriously.
I felt bad for the guy for a while, but then I remembered that he was pirating a shit-ton of microsoft games and woke me up in the middle of the night over it.
/bofh
I love Futurama
I can't believe that it was cancelled. Such a shame. But you can still buy all the DVD's from Amazon.
Plenty of fan sites exist tho, and I think the one I surf the most is http://www.gotfuturama.com/
I've also heard that there will be a direct-to-DVD set of new material published soon. Or at least that's the rumor.
Bender kicks ass!
MP3 streaming
So, I hate not being able to listen to good music while at work. Well, here are my 3 solutions:
DAAP (iTunes) streaming. I use http://www.mt-daapd.org to stream my mp3 colletion over DAAP to my work host. I use apple's mDNS responder to fake a local iTunes host with a remote IP address. Then I use iptables and a password to only allow my host access to the music library. This has proven to be a really great solution for listening to my music at work. And the iTunes interface kicks ass. Nothing else has come close to being as good as iTunes for finding my tunes.
http://www.mp3act.net/ I just stumbled upon this. An AJAX enabled web based mp3 streamer. Very cool. This went on my server with a quickness.
SomaFM. http://www.somafm.com. Excellent music stations. I listen to "Secret Agent" and "Groove Salad".
Update: Obie just informed me of this: http://www.freshlymixed.com/ Pretty sweet!
MacTel
So Apple will be switching to Intel in 2006. Initally this pissed me off and I was skeptical. After noodling on it a bit, I like it. I betcha that very quickly, the Linux hackers will make Linux that runs killer on the Intel based Macs. They'll also make compatability libraries for Linux Intel binaries. Then Windows Intel binaries. Imagine seamlessly running MS or Linux binaries on your Mac. Killer.
Some questions I have:
- How will Endianness be handled? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_endian
- What about this Rosetta stuff?
- Will Macs simply be high end PC's that run OS X? Or will it be like today's mac except an Intel Proc? I'd rather contine to have superior hardware that you just can't put together off the shelf and can't be sold by Dell.
I gotta upgrade to Tiger. Think I also need to buy a Mac Mini.
New song I'm addicted to: Starry Eyed Suprise by Paul Oakenfold
Trip to Ohio
Tracy and I took off a week and went back to Ohio to visit her family. We left last Wed night at 8pm and got back in this Tuesday night at 11pm. It was a good week. We stayed with her brother, who had recently remodeled his kitchen. He also had a cat...and my allergies were having a fit. I was miserable for a week, but it didn't really spoil the fun. We sat on his front porch and hung out with friends. The next door neighbors had a mother rabbit and her little baby bunnies living in their flower garden. It was pretty neat to see baby rabbits. I didn't manage to get a pic of the babies but did get a few of the mother.
We also took a road trip to Cincinatti to visit a friend of Tracy's from college. A pretty place. We visited Ohio State, where she went to school for a few years. A big campus, but also very pretty. I left the battery in my small digicam at home so no pics of that. D-oh. Almost contemplated driving down to TN to see my mom for her birthday, but since we only had the rental car for one day, if we left immediatly when we had come up with the idea, we would have been able to stay about 10 minutes and have to leave to make the 10 hour drive back. So, that didn't happen.
The next day we went to Mohican, an Ohio state park. Very pretty, reminded me of Fall Creek Falls in Tennesse, one of the prettiest places on earth IMHO. Lots of hills, cliffs, very green, winding roads, the lodge looked the same, etc. Didn't have a 180ft waterfall, but that's kinda rare anyway.
The
coolest part was the dam. It was erected after a giant flood destroyed
the valley. It had this giant spillway, that hasn't ever seen action
(because it was designed for biblical floods I guess). It was a giant
funnel about 70 feet across. You could hear the water from the dam
rushing below, I just wish I could have looked inside!
The next day we went to a family reunion. The weather was great and at one point, this huge black thundercloud was looming on the horizon. Very, very black cloud. But it went right around us and we continued to get sunshine the entire time. I listened to Tracy's uncle tell all kinds of stories about dogs. He told one about a dog of his in Vietnam that almost started a suicidal battle between the US and the Koreans, or something like that. He also told stories about shooting cats, which was good to hear considering cats had made me mildly miserable for most of the trip. Pretty funny guy.
Anyway, it was a good time. I miss the weather back east. They actually had spring showers followed by sunshine and birds chirping. Out here we have this gloomy weather for months during the spring/summer. And thunderstorms! Man! So cool, I forgot how much I love real weather!
I didn't get many pictures because I left that battery at home, but I did have my big cam with me so I got a few shots of other things.
Hamming It Up
Wired News: Hamming It Up at Radio Meets:
If you think you know what a nerd is, try visiting a swap meet or convention where amateur radio operators like to hang out.
Heh. There has been talk at work of 'nerd quotient'. I would like to point out that there are those of you who think that you are nerds. You're very nerdy, do lots of neat things and probably even have snazzy blogs. And then there are amateur radio nerds, who smash your nerd abilities to tiny bits. I've been a FCC licensed nerd for 12 years. :)
Lotus Elise
I want one so bad! Whoever owned this car drove it daily and hadn't washed it in what looks like months. Maybe 3-4 months. It had a scratched up Lotus logo and big rock chips up front. Greasy hand prints all over it. Made me sick.
I still love that car!
SyFy Portal Quoting me
SyFy Portal - NBC Universal Going After Internet Pirates: "Thanks to Mostron8 for the tip."
Apparently I've been quoted. Nice. But that user downloading BSG that got busted wasn't me. I swear. Just someone I know.