soapbox

So, the Major League Baseball All-Star Game was last week, and if you hadn’t heard, this one counts! (That’s right, instead of using some logical parameter on which to base home field advantage in the Finals/World Series, the MLB awards that advantage to the winner of an exhibition game. Brilliant.)

I have many thoughts on the matter, most of which will bore (most of) the soapboxosphere to death, so I’ll keep them to myself. I will however link to one post on the game that I particularly enjoyed because it goes a decent way towards capturing the contempt I feel towards the Fox broadcasting team. Tim, I know you’ll love this.

I’m also curious as to the East Coast’s reception of the pre-game festivities. Everybody out here was disgusted and disappointed, saying that the 1999 All-Star Game’s ceremony honoring Ted Williams was way better and had more Hall of Famers. My impression is that Yankees and Mets fans loved it, and if you were outside NY then it came off as cheap and tacky. As Jim Caple commented:

And while we’re at it — how come “O Canada” was a tape recording instead of a live performance? The Yankees were able to bring back the Village People to lip-synch “Y.M.C.A.” — but they somehow couldn’t find a single performer in the entire city of New York available to sing Canada’s national anthem?

It’s kinda hard for me to believe that Larry Jones (more commonly known as “Chipper”) has been playing pro ball for about a decade now. That means that I’m old, in case my most recent birthday didn’t hammer that home.

This season he started off red-hot, and there was all sorts of foolish “can he hit .400″ talk a couple months into the season. The problem is that Jones isn’t the most injury-free player around, and recently his hamstrings have been acting up to go along with past knee, quad, shoulder, and other injuries.

Which leads us to the entire point of this post – Chipper’s quote regarding his hammy:

“It’s sore right now,” he said. “I don’t know what the timetable’s going to be. Hamstrings are a little more delicate than quads or groins.”

Let the debate on the relative delicacy of hamstrings, groins, and quads begin.

Five week birthday? Five week anniversary? Whatever, she’s five weeks old today.

Here’s a picture from two weeks ago. Don’t want to keep things too up to date after all.

Kirsten and I were sitting in the kitchen last night playing with Sarah and talking to her parents on the phone when there were two very loud bangs and the power failed. Very not cool when it means that you don’t want to open the fridge to get milk for your tea. Even less cool when it’s the second night in a row where you don’t get to have your tea because of some issue with milk.

A few minutes later there were a whole bunch of sirens just down the street, so I took a little walk and saw a most impressive wreck. Some [presumably, this is Baltimore and it was 11:30 pm] drunk driver misses a turn and completely sheared off the power pole at the bottom of my street. They ended up sideways across the road. No idea of injuries, everyone had been taken away in ambulances already and I couldn’t see the front of the truck without walking across downed wires. It must have been a slow crime night in Baltimore though because there were a huge number of police, fire engines, and utility trucks.

Cutting to the end of the story, the utility people had to replace the pole to get power back to us. Unfortunately, this pole happened to be sunk in solid cement on a small bridge. The police and fire people were gone by 1:30 am and it took them until 8:30 working with jackhammers and pry bars to get the base of the old pole out and the new pole in.

The problem is that the power ended up being out for about 9 hours. That’s longer than the hold time for the freezer in a commercial refrigerator. And that means I have no ice cream!

If I were a good American, I’d sue the driver for lost goods and emotional damages.

…courtesy of some Boston MLS players. Check out this odd story for yourselves.

Also, I’m overdue for an update on the whole “yeah, I graduated and moved and started my new job”, but it’s going to take me another week or so to get into enough of a routine to post semi-regularly.

I like to think that I’m relatively well-informed when it comes to basic personal computer security, and my life is made considerably easier by not having to worry about using a windows box.  Technically I have one at work, but the IT guys are pretty good and besides I only use it every month or so when the Company sends out some stupid form that can only be accessed via the internal network and on IE.

But I have to say that I only really barely knew of the existence of the DNS Cache Poisoning, and didn’t know that the fix was (sorta) being implemented.  DNS Cache Poisoning is similar to a phishing email with a link purporting to be from eBay but is really for www.istealyourcreditcardinfo.com with spoofed url… except that it occurs on the browser level.

Think about that for a second… it’s kinda spooky.  What that means is that you can open your browser of choice, type in a url, and arrive at a webpage that looks just like what you’d expect (say, your eBay or paypal or bank login page), except that it’s really a fake.  For those of you under 30 who don’t remember a time before fast internet, the quick explanation is that the interwebs are not made of ascii-character urls but of ip addresses, domain names, etc, which are all numbers.  So if you type in www.mybank.com, your browser has to convert that to some sequence of numbers and THEN connect you  to the right page.

So anyway, what if some dastardly guy could hack that words-to-numbers conversion?  you’d be hosed, that’s what.  And you’d think that the Internet Companies would want to fix that immediately, right?

Wrong… because just like the Telecoms, the Internet (no-service) Providers don’t care about you (maybe because they are now all the same companies?)…  In fact, they kick puppies and drown kittens.

I’ve probably bored y’all long enough, but I encourage people to check out Kaminsky’s (he who discovered the bug and pushed for it to be fixed) website directly.  You can also click a button that will tell you whether or not your ISP has implemented the fix.