If you're of a certain inclination, you'll find this page a great way to waste time at work. It's the results of a survey of NMap users, revealing their favorite security tools -- "security" being to "hacking" as "liberation" is to "invasion". Frequently the difference is just a matter of perspective.

Anyway, there are a number of tools there that'll let you do sneaky things to other computer users, but the most accessible one -- and one of the coolest -- is a program called VisualRoute. It's made by these guys, and you can try it out for free. Better yet: there's a java version online! You'll need to give them your email address -- be sure to use SpamGourmet, as they specifically mention that you'll be signing up for their newsletter.

But once you've done that, you can play hacker just like they do in the movies, watching a snazzy map display each leg of network that your packets traverse to get to a given server. Okay, so it's just a fancy version of traceroute, which you already have on your computer -- but it's still a neat toy. And VisualRoute is a lot faster than sifting through traceroute data to tell where things are geographically located. A quick spin and I've confirmed that my mp3s really are coming from Moscow, that Kriston's art blog is served out of New York City (of course!), and that this site is hosted in Hong Kong, a fact I should have known but actually only dimly suspected.

reasons five billion and five billion and one that the internets are awesome:

really, how do we know when howard kurtz's column has become a cesspool of utter worthlessness? when he informs the public, who could really not give less of a shit, that two random bloggers are getting married:

Finally, I don't know the backstory here, but two bloggers are apparently getting married. Frank J of IMAO writes:

"Having found a girl crazy enough to put up with me, I decided I couldn't wait any longer. Thus I proposed on Saturday evening (and she said yes!). Probably didn't notice, but I had butterflies in my stomach all last week leading up to this...

"I feel like I should thank everyone in the blogosphere who helped me along. I started this blog to get my say out there, and never really thought I'd find a wife."

Frank's fiance, Sarah of Mountaineer Musings, recounts the proposal. You were expecting maybe that such things would remain private?

wow, people meeting over the internet and falling in love. how novel. argh. shut up, howie. shutupshutshutup. or for god sake's turn your column into a wedding announcement listing. it's already just a rundown of whatever bloggers/self-absorbed journalists are whining about that particular day. and the inescapable vortex of navel-gazing continues...

if you are in the mood for some evocative, lovely french music to listen to while you sip your cappuccino at your desk, head on over to shesbitter for a selection of very pretty mp3s. i've been listening to them over and over again this morning, and along with the fresh cut daffodils one of my bosses gave me this morning, spring is feeling pretty awesome.

by the way - if anyone can find me an mp3 of "l'appuntamento" by ornella vanoni (it's that italian song from the ocean's 12 soundtrack) i will name my firstborn goldfish after you. sbagliato tante volte ormai che lo so gi�, che oggi quasi certamente, sto sbagliando su di te.....

UPDATE (by Tom): We're not going to be posting the mp3, so please stop asking.

UPDATE 2 (also by Tom): Seriously, we don't distribute copyrighted works to strangers on the internet just because they ask. You all could be RIAA goons for all we know. Besides, we don't have the mp3 anymore. So really, you lot need to stop asking. If you want the song, you can buy the CD from Amazon — from what I can tell, it's on this album and this one... although be forewarned: if the Ocean's 12 soundtrack is like the Ocean's 11 soundtrack, they overlay irritating snippets of dialogue on top of most of the songs. I have no idea whether that's true for the O12 ST or not, but don't want to convey the impression that I'm making any guarantees.

Now seriously: please don't spam us with comments and emails asking for an mp3 we don't have and wouldn't give out if we did.

I don't know if you all paid attention to the stories about OurMedia, the Internet Archive-sponsored initiative to provide free hosting for Creative Commons content. It's a nice idea, but I tried to use it to host the Polyphonic Spree-related sound files from the post below, and the experience was so buggy and tiresome that the related post ended up even less entertaining than it otherwise would have been. The registration system didn't work right the first two times I tried it, their client-side uploading tool didn't upload the larger file to my account properly, and I'm still waiting for the smaller clip to go live. Yeesh.

So screw it. Instead, I just put the files up on this server and used CORAL, a free content distribution system provided by NYU. I won't bore you with the details, but the ten second summary goes like this -- take some URL:

http://www.zunta.org/some_directory/some_big_imaginary_file.zip

http://www.zunta.org.nyud.net:8090/some_directory/some_big_imaginary_file.zip

You'll still burn some bandwidth as CORAL periodically fetches the file from your server, but all in all it's a pretty slick solution. Worth a look if you've got something big to distribute that doesn't merit a torrent.

say you were planning a concert to do with your -ist blog. just, you know, hypothetically. and say it were taking place at the black cat backstage, featuring a couple of good, local bands. say you had NO FREAKING IDEA what to name this concert. the name should be brief, funny, and maybe punny on DC and/or the music scene. any ideas? anything involving capitol, district, and/or blog puns should be acceptable.

Here's a story about how amazing technology is.

First up: the internet. Going through my daily work-avoidance kata, I found myself ambling through this blog's archives after going looking for something and getting lost. Eventually I stumbled across a review of a Polyphonic Spree show that I wrote a while ago.

That put me into a mood to listen to their latest CD, so on the walk home from work I started playing it through piece of technology number two: the Etymotic earphones that Catherine gave me for my birthday. Then a curious thing happened. Thanks to those little wonders, I heard something I had never heard before. On the final track of the CD (the title track -- "Together We're Heavy"), around the 2:36 mark a woman's voice starts whispering into your left ear. It's very quiet. Too quiet to make out the words.

So after getting home I fired up my copy of Goldwave, grabbed the MP3 off of our music server and started trying to extract the whisper.

Turns out it's a lot harder than they make it look on Alias. I tried a bunch of things, but the most successful seemed to be to throw out the right channel, run a bandpass filter to only keep frequencies within a range that (mostly) included the whispering, then normalize the track to bring the volume back up. Whispering is a nasty thing to extract, though. It's all sibilant and high frequency, with a broad frequency profile and (so far as I no) no one fundamental frequency. It also features occasional bursts of low-end that can't be chopped off without losing a lot of information. If a friendly audio engineer is passing by internet way I'd love to hear what the proper way to do this.

But, for now, this is all that I could come up with. By way of comparison, here's a snippet of the original. The whispering is more isolated, but it's still damn hard to tell what the hell is being said. I can't really make much of it out. I think it begins with "before anybody began ... created a giant banana ... the joint was filled with ...". Yes, I'm perfectly serious. Sounds like a Polyphonic creation myth to me, but I'd love to hear other theories.

I haven't forced my addled ears to listen to much more of this considerable segment of whispering, but if anyone feel like giving it a try, help yourselves.

fyi - decemberist tickets are on sale this thursday at 10 a.m. the show is may 6. anybody interested? if their live act is anything as enjoyable as a) colin meloy's solo show or b) their adorable video for 16 military wives, it'll be fun.

update: CMJ has a feature/interview/review thingy with the decemberists here. (via chromewaves)

question: how can steve carell be SO FRICKIN HYSTERICAL in "anchorman," yet just tepidly, barely funny on the office?

it boggles the mind.

i forgot to mention - last friday i went with DCist-ers mike, becca and kanishka to a guest-list only party at indebleu thrown by the washington socialites. all i know is that the free drinks kept on a-comin', there were cameras and flat screens in the bathrooms, and much tabletop dancing went on. not by me, thankfully. though it was probably close.

today i checked the socialite's site and saw that they had put a gallery of photos up. then i realized what else was at the party: a hell of a lot of breasts. thankfully i'm only in the background of one of the pictures on this page, looking about as bemused by the scene as i felt. but it was definitely a good time. huzzah to the socialites!

Catherine cruelly belittled my new blockbuster sociological theory, first introduced on Saturday night somewhere between wine bottle 4 and wine bottle 7. But revolutionary thinking is frequently met with hostility by those locked into a bourgeois mindset. I hope you all will be a little more reasonable.

So, the question before you: as playing videogames becomes a ubiquitous male institution (like playing sports or having a penis), will women be attracted to men on the basis of male profiency (in the same way they are attracted to men who are of above average proficiency at sports or at having a penis).

I contend that yes, yes they will. At the time my rhetorical abilities were limited to making everyone watch some video from Dungeon Majesty, but having conducted a more exhaustive survey of the related literature (ie, after spending five minutes on google), I am prepared to explain to you ladies why you find things attractive. I'm sure you're eager to find out.

Based upon this article, there seem to be four theories that are used to explain female mate selection.

1. "The good genes theory 'argues that females exhibit mate choice in order to provide their offspring with a partner's genes that will advance their offspring's chances of survival or reproductive success'". This seems a little circular to me: a female identifies a male with good genes by trying to select one with good genes. Hmm. Maybe wikibooks.org isn't the renowned academic institution I thought it was. Plunging onward...


2. "The good parent theory suggests that 'choosy individuals select partners on the basis of how well they will care for their offspring'". Now we're getting somewhere. On this basis, videogame proficiency clearly qualifies as a desirable trait: in the event of an alien, ninja or shark attack you can be assured that my offspring would be safer than most. If Ryu from Street Fighter shows up, though, I'm screwed. Sorry, ladies. If this is a concern, you might try wearing a low-cut shirt near Jon.


3. "The healthy mate theory occurs when females prefer 'males healthy enough to produce and maintain elaborate ornaments' (Alcock 491). A good example of this is in female house finches, who choose male mates based on their bright coloration. Bright coloration tells the female that the male is more resistant to pathogens and parasites." Again, videogame playing should be a decisive evolutionary win. Not only does it come with distinctive plumage of a sort (thick thumb calluses; translucent skin under eyes), but the accompanying ornamentation (e.g. extra controllers, XBox Live subscriptions, DDR pads) speaks to the ability to sustain an above-subsistence lifestyle, and to avoid manual labor of any sort (and its almost certain accompaniment, a violent and premature death -- usually involving a radial saw).
4. Alright, so we've established that I would make a highly attractive mate for a female house finch. What about, you know, human girls? This brings us to the runaway selection theory. "It states that by being choosy, females 'create a positive feedback loop favoring both males with these attributes and females that prefer them'". To summarize: females are capricious and arbitrary (also: bad at math). A choice gets made, and the act of choosing establishes a cyclical, reinforcing phenomenon. So only a few females need to randomly find gamers attractive for the trait to begin to be passed on to future females and encouraged in the male population.

More seriously, I think that industrialized societies allow for sufficiently quick generational transitions between economic classes and a good enough safety net that specific types of male competition are too abstracted from the ability to propagate genes for them to have much evolutionary significance. Sure, there are old, hardwired biological cues -- symmetric features roughly equal undamaged genes, and serious physical infirmity is rarely a turnon. But other arenas of relative achievement -- amassing wealth, or being good at sports, or appearing intelligent and artistic -- are attractive simply because they're competitive. To the extent that one man (A) is better than another man (B) at almost anything, man A will be considered more attractive.

So yes, once videogames are fully integrated into our culture and everyone in a given high school knows who's the best at whatever videogame is the most popular, I think that game proficiency will begin to be viewed as an attractive characteristic by said high school's population of girls.

Once that happens the feedback loop will be established, and the world's geeks will enjoy increased opportunities for romantic embarassment. Well, at least until the jocks apply their superior hand-eye coordination and take over the whole enterprise. Then it's back to dreaming about your D&D character's +1 enchanted mace somehow granting access to +2 human boobs.

(Apologies for the unoriginal title. I really wanted to call this "baby you don't love me, you just love my bloggy style", but couldn't come up with a justification for it.)

remember a little while back i wrote about the three new luxury magazines coming to d.c. this spring? well, according to an article in today's post, it looks like at least one of them understands what the young urban people in this city really need:

Of the three, Spain-Smith's D.C. Style is staking out the most prosaic niche, one occupied by the 40-year-old Washingtonian magazine, which has more than 150,000 subscribers. Their average household income is $185,800. A four-color ad can cost up to $20,000.

Spain-Smith said D.C. Style is targeted at a slightly younger, more urban audience than Washingtonian. One with slightly less disposable income.

"We'll still show you the $8,000 bag, but we're going to show you an $800 one too," she said.

I've just put something up about the case at BTD, and am not quite sure how to handle it. I said I'd cross-post tech articles, but this is only sort of a tech article. So maybe I'll just give you a link.

i'll be making a couple of trips in the next month, and i need me some daggone literature to keep myself occupied. recommendations for good vacation reading?

qualifications for good vacation reading:
-must be lighthearted and not at all intellectual
-i must be able to read and comprehend it while drunk
-must not be utter trash
-no chick lit (this would be any book that has a picture/stylish cartoon drawing of a woman in a little black dress on the cover)
-must be good, but not so good that i spend the entire vacation reading instead of, you know, vacationing

last night it came to my attention, during a dramatic rereading of this blog entry by matt, that many people had interpreted the burning balcony story to be a situation where i was the helpless damsel and tommy was the savior of the day. one person even went so far as to praise tommy for being the one who came up with "the idea to put the fire out with water." at this point my head exploded, so i need to make it clear: i was the FIRST ONE to start putting the fire out with a glass of water, so that revolutionary solution to that particular problem was mine. i was not standing around, shrieking to the high heavens as tommy valiantly ran back and forth with his heroic bowl of water and saved us all from certain balcony death. let's just be clear here. catherine=brave, resolute putter outer of fires, tommy=catherine's sidekick in this venture.

thus ends my contribution to the promotion of women in the sexist blogosphere.

happy easter! as you may have figured out by now, i'm not a particularly religious person, but who doesn't love a holiday where you wake up to baskets of chocolate and jelly beans? and easter egg hunts. those are the bomb.

anyway, as far as i can figure it out, the italians are a culture who have figured out how to do easter right. lots of creepy, creepy religious symbolism, freaky ritualized ceremonies (check out the florentine explosion of the cart, or scoppio del carro), and food. check out these photos of an easter parade i saw when i was in naples two years ago. it was a bizarrely lovely thing. the lovesicily blog also has an interesting post on easter stuff in the town of ispica.

as for me, i'm going to clean up some of the remnants of last night's dinner party (ask tommy to tell you about his STUPID, STUPID theory regarding video gamers and the girls that desperately want to screw them sometime) and then am off to my family's house with tommy, where we will hopefully eat ham. lots and lots of ham.

For those interested, Bungie's finally released word on the downloadable content update for Halo 2. The short version: nine new maps released on a staggered basis beginning in late April. Half of them will be free from the get-go; all of them will be free by the end of the summer. Non-XBL users can buy a disc of them for $20; those who download the maps will presumably pay somewhat less than that.

Just in time for the sunny weather! This should help me maintain that robust pallor I've got going on.

a while back, i had a kind of controversial post where i stated that i thought several female bloggers received more traffic than they might have otherwise due to their choice to prominently display an attractive picture of themselves. one of those bloggers was lindsay at majikthise, and while i still stand by my earlier comments on the subject and normally don't find her blogging appealing, she has had several excellent posts on the schiavo case. in return, she is now now receiving death threats. lovely.

honestly, watching this entire schiavo thing unfold and reading about it on the internets has been one of the most surreal spectacles i've ever witnessed. these people are truly grasped in the fervor of some bizarre ecstasy i have never experienced, and that i hope to never experience. where's the outrage over the indian reservation killings (not to mention some sort of true action or thoughtful comments by the president)? does no one care that a 9 year old boy was shot in the face last night in d.c.? what kind of terrifying zealousness allows you to slander a private citizen with only hearsay and intuition to back you up or steal a gun to try to "rescue terry"?

honestly, i can't wrap my head around it, nor do i want to. and i obviously have nothing worthwhile or meaningful to say about this case, except that i don't scare too easily - but these people frighten the living daylights out of me. i feel like we're back in medieval times.

Check out my sister's new gig! Let's all go demand free drinks.

i was reading a guardian article on charlotte bronte, which complains that her biography (written by elizabeth gaskell) and other facets of her life have been, throughout the years, totally puritanized, and that bronte was really a "filthy bitch, grandmother of chick-lit, and friend." as you can imagine, i am already finding the piece pretty awesome.

so i'm traisping along through the article, finding out all sorts of things i never knew about bronte; for example, she had hardly any teeth! she had a torrid correspondence with a monsieur from brussels! she was obsessed with sex! (well, i guess i could have inferred that some of that last part from jane eyre.)

and, the best part of all: she HATED small children. now, i love small children (well, er, normally...don't ask tommy about my rants regarding kicking my six-year old students in italy out of windows), but you are a wasted, steel-hearted person if you do not find this passage from her journal as a schoolteacher mind-bogglingly hysterical:

"I had been toiling for nearly an hour. I sat sinking from irritation and weariness into a kind of lethargy. The thought came over me: am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness, the apathy and the hyperbolic and most asinine stupidity of these fat headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience and assiduity? Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare walls, while the glorious summer suns are burning in heaven and the year is revolving in its richest glow and declaring at the close of every summer day the time I am losing will never come again? Just then a dolt came up with a lesson. I thought I should have vomited."

fat headed oafs! vomiting on children! oh, lord. i can't stop laughing. it's like bronte read my mind on the worst days of my brief teaching career. small children are generally lovable and adorable, but there are just sometimes when you feel ready to punt them over a wall. i'm glad to see that bronte agrees.

(ps - please do not find me psychopathic because i laugh hysterically at endorsements of child hate and often daydreamed about throwing children through windows. it's, erm...nevermind. it's nothing. i didn't say anything.)

update: once in a while i like to think about what great literary figures would have been good bloggers. i think charlotte bronte can be safely added to that list. she was ugly but filled with passion, so she could have hid behind the safety of her computer screen while composing an interesting personality; hyper intelligent but completely smothered by rage, and everybody knows you gotta be an angry freak once in a while to have a good blog. what other authors would have been good bloggers?

Well, I've got a problem. It's time to draw from the vast collective wisdom of the internet -- I'm counting on you guys. But this is sort of one of those "I'm running out of space for all my gold doubloons" problems, and I'll understand if you all just bitch me out instead.

So Catherine and I and several of you are all going to Italy at the end of April. It's gonna be great, and I'm going to eat thiiiiiis much gelato and ride the gondola twice. Or at least drink my bodyweight in wine.

Well, it'll be a fun time, but while they were busy filling their country with picturesque locations and people the Italians frustratingly neglected to build an effective, pan-Tuscan mass transportation system. The trains are great for moving between cities and non-miniscule towns, but we're still going to need some rental cars.

Italy boasts some of Europe's priciest rental cars. For an automatic transmission I'm having a hard time cracking the $700/week level. If I could drive stick, though... well, nearly $300 could be shaved off that figure.

The problem is that I haven't driven stick since I was sixteen. My mom felt it was important that I learn -- she approached it like a survival skill, and wanted me to be prepared for the complete lack of automatic transmissions that would doubtless accompany the nuclear winter/viral epidemic/zombie attacks of the future. So we spent a few hours driving up and down my grandparents' street in their decrepit Volkswagen Rabbit. I didn't perform very well, but neither did the car, so for all I know I could be the world's greatest manual transmission driver, EVER.

So what do you guys think? Is this fake-able? Is there a good way to learn before I go? The rental car's clutch only needs to last for seven days, after all.

if you watched this week's episode of american idol, you might have noticed that paula abdul seemed a little, well...more crazy-ass than usual. she slurred words, pawed simon even more than normal, lolled her head around and was just plain weird.

but we should have seen the signs a-comin'; it's clear that paula was on the verge of a COMPLETE INSANE BREAKDOWN, the description of which is so totally awesome that i must post most of it here:

Abdul flew to Kuala Lumpur last Friday for the Force of Nature Tsunami Aid benefit as the guest of the King and Queen of Malaysia. She joined the likes of Lauryn Hill, Wyclef Jean, Jackie Chan, Bai Ling, Joey Fatone and the Black Eyed Peas. Abdul introduced Hill at a gala concert.

The next day, however, Abdul was at her suite at the Kuala Lumpur Ritz-Carlton when she learned that Los Angeles authorities planned to file a criminal charge against her for a hit-and-run incident she was involved in last December, which carries a maximum penalty of up to six months in jail.

Abdul was scheduled to have tea with the king and queen at the Malaysian Royal Palace on Saturday but refused to leave her bed, our source reports. A girlfriend who accompanied her on the trip told her she had to pull herself together and attend, since the royals were footing the bill. But when Abdul and her pal returned to the hotel, the pop star flipped out.

Abdul scratched her friend's face and the fracas was seen by a Ritz-Carlton staffer who entered the room. Before long, word of the fisticuffs spread among the other celebs staying at the hotel.

We're told that Abdul finally cooled off, but the next day, she flipped out again during her flight back to California with the friend. She threw a bracelet at her pal and screamed that the friend "owed her money" for a hamburger she'd consumed at the hotel.

fisticuffs over a freakin hamburger? paula, get your act together. this is not the kind of attitude i expect from someone representing the fine folks of american idol. clean yourself up, get off the quaaludes, and stop having sex with simon. it's obviously not helping.

also, WHO IS THIS FRIEND that puts up with a crazy bitch scratching her face and demanding repayment for $5 hamburgers? that's not friendship; that's a little thing called abuse.

More news from the "cellphone companies are evil" department: the collaboration between Apple and Motorola to produce the long-sought iPod phone is going to be delayed. The reason? Cellphone carriers don't particularly like the idea of consumers being able to put music on their phones at-will; they'd rather have them pay for every song that gets loaded, like the current situation with ringtones.

It's more or less tradition at this point, so I'll just stick it in here: cyber-serfdom! Perpetual revenue streams! Naked bodies in gel-filled pods!

If the carriers don't play ball, a phone becomes a much tougher sell. Standard practice is for carriers to chop a couple hundred dollars off the price of a handset, shifting the cost into the service contract. If the network operators don't want a phone released, they can simply decline to offer this price-shifting system, and suddenly the phone costs $200 more than it otherwise would. And if you think those shifted costs would be deducted from customers' service contracts, you're nuts. Owning an iPhone would get real pricey, real fast.

Anyway, the situation isn't all that dire. As the article notes, the iPhone could be a big win for a slightly-less-evil-than-usual underdog like T-Mobile; alternately, Apple might just try to sell the device at the full-price premium -- it wouldn't be the first time people have shelled out for a sexy slab of plastic from Cupertino.

The guys over at Begging To Differ have invited me to join their site, and I've said yes. So if you've always thought BTD's pretty good but could use more shrill, uninformed commentary, well, give it another look.

I doubt my posting here will be affected much -- I'm planning to approach the BTD gig with a higher signal/noise ratio than here, the goal being 2 or 3 substantive posts a week. Plus the content will probably be more political. I'll probably cross-post technical items with this site.

That's it! Return to your homes and families.

Pat O'Brien has been a bad boy.

Michael Jackson has been bad with boys.

Diagram and discuss.

PLUMPERS!?

...because they go together like pb&j, obviously!

tonight, for no reason, tommy bought me pretty tulips and took me out to heritage india for dinner (it was super yummy).

and how did i repay him? by sending him this link to a story about poop.

i am an awesome girlfriend.

no, seriously, go read it. you'll laugh your ass off. poo in a dixe cup - oh lord!

why is that i can be good at many computer things but SO AWFULLY WRETCHED at designing powerpoint slides? one of my bosses asked me to design a lengthy powerpoint presentation of all of our publications for the national conference in san diego next week (no, i do not get to go; no, i am not AT ALL BITTER that my coworkers are escaping the 40 days 40 nights scenario here in d.c. for sunshine and, like, seals, or whatever). and for the life of me, i cannot figure this shit out. i have spent nearly three hours on this goddamn thing and i have five nasty-looking pages to show for it.

the powerpoint invention is a blight on the human race and needs to be eradicated. do people actually use this thing for anything USEFUL? if so, do you have any powerpoint tips? or, um, alcohol?

I've mentioned Tor before in the context of BitTorrent, but now that I'm on a contract site, it's worth talking about its more traditional use: anonymous websurfing.

It's really, really easy to see the contents of traffic on the same subnet as your PC. Practically speaking, you're likely to be on the same subnet if you're plugged into the same router, and you're likely to share a router with other folks in your department, floor, office or building, depending on the size of your corporate overlords.

Don't believe me? Go download Ethereal and fire it up. It's not the most user-friendly app in the world, but you should be able to wrestle it into coughing up some packets, and if you sift through them you'll be able to find your coworkers' IM conversations, web surfing habits, and (frequently) email. Creepy, right?

Well, you can be sure that your company's IT department can do the same thing, only with a lot less effort. Do you really want them peering over your virtual shoulder? Of course not. I know what you've been looking at, you pervert.

So what's to be done? Simple. Encrypt all your traffic, for one. For another, send it zipping randomly throughout the internet so that your office geek can't see who your PC is talking to. This is exactly what Tor does. Go here and follow the instructions. You just need to install Tor and a piece of software called Privoxy. Both are free, and both are easy to install. You might also want to install a Firefox extension called SwitchProxy to let you easily turn the whole apparatus on and off.

Once you've got that up and running, it's as simple as selecting an item from a dropdown to send your web-surfing whizzing through random intermediaries, safely encrypted. Sure, things get slightly slower (slightly). But it's pretty cool to have your homepage pop up with a big "Auf gut Glück!" button: right now, Google thinks I'm in Germany.

...when your uncle's on the front page of Slashdot.

(thanks to Justin M. for the link)

Another school shooting, another scapegoat. It looks like today's tragedy in Minnesota is likely to be blamed on the shooter's participation in neonazi online communities. Well, I won't be shedding any tears over any heat that the "Libertarian National Socialist Green Party" takes for this, but it seems likely be just as non-constructive as blaming videogames was at Columbine.

well, i've just returned from the brookings panel: The Impact of New Media. overall it was an interesting event, though hardly cutting-edge or anything. i figure that once the brookings institution holds a panel on blogging, the whole medium has more or less peaked (i see that tommy has already made fun of people who keep saying that, but i still think it's true, though not witty). but it was good. the brookings people tried superhard to be interconnecty and accessible to the internet and bloggers. there was a live webcast; several bloggers liveblogged the event while watching the webcast; the bloggers' thoughts as they liveblogged were shown on a big ass movie screen to the people attending the conference; and ruy teixeira blogged from the event while huddled on the ground in a corner of the room. SO META! i got the feeling, while watching the panelists watch the liveblogging screen, written by the livebloggers watching the panelists, that i was in an inescapable vortex of meta blogging hell.

wonkette, andrew sullivan, jack shafer, jodie allen of pew and ellen shatner of talkradionews.com were the panelists, and EJ dionne was the moderator. a lot of talk had been made about the fact that no "real" liberal bloggers were invited, but dionne pointed out that yglesias, josh marshall and kos had all been invited, but for one reason or another (including the fact that at least one of them never responded to the invite) didn't make it.

first off, i have to say that dionne is just as cute as a button, and i thought he did as good a job as possible of moderating. he was engaging, funny, and directed the discussion without being terribly forceful or annoying about it.

shafer, shatner, and wonkette, i thought, didn't really have too much to add to the discussion. shafer was entertaining at times, but then at one particular point when off on this strange rant about how slander is all in the mind of the person being slandered; i believe his quote went something like "one person's slander is another person's truth; it doesn't matter if i slander you and the courts find i didn't slander you and then you are still mad at me because i slandered you but it's not really slander and blogs can slander all they want!" yeah, his particular remarks about slander made just as much sense as my recap of them. other panelists tried to point out that slander does, in fact, exist in many cases; slander is not in the mind of the beholder - there is objective, factual slander - but shafer wasn't having any of it for some reason.

surprisingly, my favorite panelist was andrew sullivan, who arrived late to the panel. he has a very shiny, very red head, weird glasses, and talks in a strange hybrid english-american accent, but he probably reflected my own personal opinions about new media the best; ie, he was somewhere in between "blogs are the savior of the universe" and "blogs are the drug-addled rants of the uninformed proletariat." he thinks that blogging is a new literary genre, that it's more about commentary than real reporting, and that bloggers have to be true pariahs and outsiders in order to effectively comment on topics, otherwise they run into too many conflicts of interest or problems with hurting people's feelings. he did get whacked out though, talking about the women in the blogosphere argument that's been running around for a while. his opinion: blogs will always be dominated by men and that women aren't in any way being discriminated against. basically, i felt the gist of it was: women aren't saying anything worth linking to, so if they're not well-represented, it's their fault. at that point i went and stepped on his namby-pamby glasses and powdered his head, which was blinding me.

jodie allen also had some good points, i thought. she seemed to be less interested in the over-discussed point of "is blogging journalism?" jesus christ. who cares? it is, it isn't, it's different, it's the same, blah blah blah. she was more into "what the hell is going to happen with this medium, how are people going to intwine it with their news gathering, how will journalism pay for and sustain itself, and how can traditional journalism adapt to new media and use it to its advantage?" these are the serious questions that panels like these should actually address, and the kind of thing i want to work on at northwestern. she said she believes that in the Future! we'll all carry around little flat screen displays, on to which we can download newspaper articles, web surf, listen to audio and watch tv clips. this sounds kind of whacky, but i wouldn't be surprised if something like that eventually did replace or at least give competition to the basic print newspaper.

what she also said that i really believe in is that people are, more than ever, becoming their own journalistic assemblers. we're not passive consumers of traditional news sources; we're picking and choosing what we listen to and read and compiling, in essence, our own bureaus or, like, staffs. like we're the crazy newspaper editor and we decide that kevin drum is going to our go-to guy on social security; abu aardvark will be who we read for middle east coverage; kriston will give up the hott arts coverage; and for an overview of stuff and if i need to look up a particular point, i'll still read a lot of the washingtonpost.com site every day. and it's all delivered immediately and directly to your desktop, especially if you have a good RSS reader or a bloglines account (which you should really look into; i think the adaptation and integration of RSS is going to dictate and control a lot of the future of online journalism).

anyway. i'm getting a bit nerdy. overall: panel, fun, not incredibly revealing, but not a bad way to spend two hours getting out of work. and ana marie cox was wearing some nice shoes. but it's true - she really does make too many sex and drinking jokes, even in person. it actually got uber annoying. but her incorporation of the phrase "circle jerk" was probably the funniest and truest part about the entire panel.

I just finished watching the webcast of Brookings' panel discussion on blogging, and I've got to say: I'm finding it better and better the more I'm done watching it.

I was tuned in to try and catch Catherine -- she was in attendance (with her boss! party!), and for some reason I find the idea of sending her creepily all-knowing text messages incredibly entertaining. So I was perched at my computer monitor just waiting for something, ANYTHING noteworthy to happen, that I might dash off an SMS peppered with the word "Clarice" and send it to my long-suffering girlfriend. Of course she was no doubt well-aware that the events were being netcast and would have just rolled her eyes and chucked the phone back into her purse. But here in cubicle-land we take what longshot kicks we can get: the only alternative is to drink lots of water so that I can leave my desk to go to the bathroom more often.

I'm sure Catherine will have some keen insights to share about blogging, the future of blogging, and journalism: yea or nay? But here's what I came away with:

• Podcasting? VoIP? Let this serve as a warning to my fellow nerds: allow deeply nontechnical people to start to think they're on the cutting edge and they'll start grasping onto any buzzword technology they encounter like a life preserver, desperate to keep their heads above the icy waters of irrelevance. Thank god these people are too dumb to understand what XML or Web Services are or we'd all be hearing about how they're going to save democracy and deliver us our dinners in pill form -- in cities on the moon. No, thank you. The technoligarchy must be preserved!


• You know that guy, the one who asks the questions that aren't questions but really thesis proposals that he's desperately hoping will be instantly recognized as works of original genius that'll immediately get him invited to better parties? Except the insights are actually either fairly pedestrian or completely out of touch with reality? Yeah, today's one-of-those-guys was one of these guys. I've fallen prey to that weakness before, too -- I'm sure you're all shocked to hear that I can be a pretentious ass. But c'mon, guy -- this is getting broadcast on the internet! You never know who might be watching you, or if they might be naked at the time.


• It wasn't just the little guys who looked ridiculous, though. The best part of the whole panel: when it came time for everyone to share their closing thoughts, multiple panelists all had canned lines at the ready joking how "blogging is clearly over over if we're having a Brookings panel discussion on it". Ha ha! You guys are so ahead of the curve. Except, after the first time that joke is made, it becomes substantially less witty, so there's no point in repeating it. I could draw you a rough graph if it'd help. However, the exchange was at least partly saved thanks to moderator E.J. Dionne, who called out the guests uttering the ungracious bon-nots thusly: "you guys are kind of dicks." (That may be a paraphrase.)

So, to summarize: there's this thing called blogging.

Catherine's right: the wedding was great. The abstract concept of the ceremony still seems impossibly weird to me, a strange cross between commodifying women and playing feudal lord for a day. Most likely that's just my subconscious shrieking in terror, but it all still seems a little bizarre.

But the reception made perfect sense: drink a bunch and eat a big meal. Even I can grasp that. Special thanks to Julie for entertaining my drunken crackpot theory about why bowing your head to pray is an evolutionary artifact. Or maybe I was just reflecting on how awesome it was when they all the evil monkeys got cut by lasers at the end of Congo. It's hard to keep it all straight.

One word of warning to fellow attendees, though. You may have noticed that in addition to their already amazing levels of generousity, Jason, Corbin and their families succubed to the slowly growing tradition wherein every attendee at a wedding gives a present to every other one. So Corbin and Jason had a basket of golf tees and monogrammed packets of coffee for departing guests. The packets say "A Perfect Blend" under their names. Awww.

Well, enjoy the sticker, but please -- don't actually brew and drink it. I had three cups when I woke up this morning, and suddenly I couldn't read. Seriously. I couldn't focus on words properly to string them together, and I had to try identifying objects to make sure I wasn't going blind -- and it wasn't just that I was jittery or overstimulated. I feel like I now have a vivid idea of what dyslexia might be like. Catherine had a bit less and just got a nasty headache, but for me the effect was unpleasant and really kind of frightening -- enough that, unsure the coffee was to blame, I went out and bought some aspirin to thin out my blood, just in case. Was I being a crybaby hypochondriac? Well, yes. But still.

Fortunately I eventually went through the headache stage and now feel pretty much ok. But I won't be repeating the experiment with the other packet we picked up. Partially burned foods like coffee have an incredible array of weird molecules in them; probably this is just a slightly unusual coffee with extra theophylline or something, and I may be unusually sensitive to whatever it is. But yeah -- that was bad.

The other working theory is that, spiritually infused with Jason and Corbin's virtuous and sanctified love, the coffee affected my twisted misanthropy like holy water sprayed on a vampire. For now we're sticking with the theophylline thing, though.

my flickr stream of jason and corbin's wedding! despite all my bitching, it was lovely, and we had a great time. i didn't even get drunk and ruin everything. now the happy couple is on a cruise in the east caribbean, and i'm a gonna go for a bike ride.

you can also see naomi's photos here.

a comment received on this post last night:

IP Address: 68.166.220.77
Name: M. Chiarello
Email Address: michael@napastyle.com
URL: http://www.napastyle.com

Comments:

I really appreciate all your honesty....love to hear how you think my show can improve...hate is hard to fix but a few constructive thoughts can go a long way. I try to cook dishes that are simple...ingredients avail. at an Piggly Wiggly but feel an obligation to encourage all to use best possible when possible.

Lets hear your thoughts

M. Chiarello

my original post reads:

i got inspired last weekend by watching my usual hungover sunday morning foodtv lineup of everyday italian, barefoot contessa, and easy entertaining with michael chiarello. these people are all fancy bitches who are constantly rambling on about how their recipes and entertaining methods are going to make your life SO MUCH easier, when really it's only easy for them because they a) live on tv b) have two billion dollars c) have a staff of minions that actually do everything for them so they DO make it look easy....(by the way, i just have to bitch about this: i CANNOT STAND when these "italian" cooks on food tv like giada and michael chiarello, who probably grew up in long island or something and can barely sneeze out a proper-sounding "buongiorno", insist on pronouncing absolutely every italian ingredient in faux-authentic-italian. like, mozzarella. i fancy myself able to speak italian, and when i'm IN ITALY, i say mozzarella with the correct pronunciation. but i don't go prancing about saying MOE-ZAH-RRRRE-LLAH with extremely enunciated syllables EVERY OTHER SECOND. JESUS! you're not fooling anybody! and if you've pissed me off with your pretentiousness, you must be WAY GONE.)

i am a terrible person who is going to hell. michael chiarello spent his friday night reading that i hate him. i feel SO BAD. i'm watching his show right now and i can't even look him in the eyes.

michael, darling, i'm sorry. fly me out to napa for a chat. we can fix this hate, i swear.

• LSU
• Creighton
• Ohio
• Iowa
• UTEP

Fucking UTEP.

yet another tale of fire tragedy: alberto's pizza on P street, one of my favorite lunchtime spots, apparently burned down yesterday. goddammit. where else am i going to get a huge, $3 slice of thincrust cheese pizza that i actually want to eat while sober?

Via Michael, and now Slashdot, check out New Scientist's Thirteen Things That Do Not Make Sense. It's a fascinating read, although it overstates the evidence for homeopathy and cold fusion, and makes the placebo effect sound more mysterious than it is by pretending that biochemistry and psychology are neatly separable. There's a brief but (I think) interesting tidbit from my undergrad days after the cut.

Anyway, go have a read. I won't pretend to understand the scientific ramifications of each of the potential resolutions to these mysteries. But personally, I read "mystery in physics" as "there's still a chance for hoverboards".

amusing google search query of the day that has led to zunta: "needing to poop"

ahem. a couple of shots of espresso and a few dozen jumping jacks should do the trick, buddy.

so, if you haven't realized by now through my continued whining, we've got this wedding thing to go to on saturday. a formal wedding, which, turns out, is a real pain in the ass. tuxes must be rented, non-ugly evening gowns must be bought, one must figure out how to do hair in a way that does not make one look like a monochromatic pinhead, etc. i've even got to paint my toenails. sheesh.

and i know i whine too much about it, really. but you have NO IDEA of what i had to go through to get a relatively normal-looking, affordable dress. let me take you on a little trip through the annals of a timewarped 80s fashion warehouse of death, aka Hecht's Department Store.

How many meetings would you say you average at work? And how useful are they?

I ask because I'm currently working on a contract basis for one of my company's repeat customers, and these guys have a LOT of meetings. This didn't bother me so much the last time I was here. From 10:30 to 1 every day the IT department pretty much clears out, leaving me free to goof off. Unfortunately, since my last visit they've installed a security card reader on the bathroom door, and I don't have a card -- I have to find someone and borrow one. I do, however, have unfettered access to the coffee in the break room.

So it's kind of like that post-apocalyptic episode of the Twilight Zone featuring the bookworm with the broken glasses. Except, you know, with peeing.

stumbling around the kitchen this morning and attempting to make coffee, an odd, unrecognized scent wafted towards my nose. what the hell is that? i thought blearily, standing still in the kitchen with the coffee grinder in one hand and a filter in the other, sniffing in the air. i was also wearing uva sweatpants, tommy's old, ratty, gray robe, a green tank top and a headband to pull back my unwashed hair, so i can assure you that it was a lovely sight. then it hit me - i was smelling smoked ham. huh, i thought. weird. in my early-morning-retardation, i figured it had to do with the lamb that tommy and i had baked last night for dinner. because smoked ham smells exactly like lamb rubbed with garlic and rosemary, and the smell of course continues to permeate the kitchen well into the next morning, pungent enough to awaken the senses of someone who can barely see past her nose at 7:30 am. sure! made sense to me.

thus i ignored the smoked ham smell and went on to do my regular morning routine - finishing up the coffee, showering, getting dressed, putting on make-up, sitting down with a mug of coffee and reading the morning news on my shiny new silver laptop that i love like a brand-new puppy. all the while the smoked ham smell lingered in the background, wafting up through the kitchen like a summer breeze. a ham-tinged summer breeze. and i paid no mind.

finally, as i was getting ready to head out the door around 8:30, i did something i never do: i decided to step outside on the balcony to test the weather. normally i just throw on my black quilted jacket that serves me well throughout the winter months, but there'd been a taste of spring in the nighttime air the previous evening, and i thought that i could wear something a bit lighter.

so i opened the door from the kitchen to the balcony. our lovely, wooden balcony, lined with lovely, wooden planters and a lovely, wooden railing. pieces of which now lay on the floor in ashes, smoldering, as heavy plumes of smoke rose up from a planter that was quite clearly on fire.

i stood there for a second, contemplating, and finishing off my coffee. hmm, i thought. my brain began to slowly process facts. i see smoke. a large chunk of that part of the railing is no longer there and seems to be charred. the plant in that particular planter, formerly dead from the winter cold, is on fire. and it all smells like smoked ham. interesting.

wait. not interesting, my brain thought. fire. burning. wooden balcony that could go up like kindling any moment and engulf all of O Street in a burning twisted mass of destruction OH MY GAWWWWWWD.

you know when you get really scared about something, it's incredibly hard to articulate, well, anything? yeah. you should have seen me this morning. i stood there blankly, looking at the smoke, then said, blankly, "oh. my god. tommy. get here now."

tommy: "why?"

catherine: "get out here! it's - it's on - the thing, that thing is smokey!"

tommy: "what?"

catherine: "BALCONY FIRE DEATH!"

i exaggerate, naturally. there were no leaping flames, and the mini-fire-smoldering-thing was contained quite easily by tommy and me running back and forth with bowls of water (god forbid that we remember there is a fire extinguisher right behind the door to the balcony). about half of a wooden planter was destroyed, and the top of a section of railing. as best as we can figure, unless spontaneous combustion exists in old soil, last evening charles, whom up until today i considered to be a very intelligent young man, put his cigarette out in the wooden planter instead of an ashtray and unwittingly left it to smolder THE ENTIRE NIGHT, thereby ensuring DEATH AND DESTRUCTION and endangering any prospects of MY SPRING BALCONY PLANS, which involve many glasses of wine and spitting contests.

anyway, this seems like common sense, but please: if you come over to our place and have a smoke on the balcony, do not leave it to smolder on or near a wood-based product (ie the entire structure). put it in an ashtray. throw it out in the alley. for the love of god, don't destroy our balcony! otherwise, how are we going to bring our charcoal griller out there this summer? sheesh.

The first games have tipped and things are underway. I'm not a huge college basketball fan most of the year (thanks, suck-ass UVA), but today's a special day: nobody works very hard, instead crowding around breakroom TVs or listening to internet radio streams.

Emboldened by an unlikely win in Jon's office pool last year, I'm nurturing naive dreams of bracketological glory. But how to best maniacally track my march toward victory? Yahoo offers realtime tracking, but you've got to refresh the page to see updates. Anyone know any free realtime java sites that'll still let you submit a bracket?

well, here we are: unrequited narcissism's 1,000th post! let's get self-congratulatory, shall we? this little corner of the internet started out 999 posts ago on august 28th, 2002, with a post by tommy about a week after i had headed off for a year in milan. for quite a long time, almost my entire year in italy, i was the only author of the blog, posting pictures of my heeelarious expat adventures with little commentary, except to say enlightened things as "that pizza was bigger than my head!" or "france really sucks." incredible that from those humble beginnings, this blog has turned into the TOTAL MEDIA POWERHOUSE that you see before you today, eh? according to our rather unreliable stats, we get around 300 visitors, or hits, or page views, or whatever, per day, and we've got over 3,000 comments. and we love it all! we are saps, but we are really completely in love with blogging, this blog, and the ways in which it has enriched our lives. *wipes away tear* so, thanks to the academy, and all our fans - this one goes out to you!

TOM SAYS: At just over 514,000 words, I think this blog is serving its purpose as a compromise between Catherine and my desire to write and our pathetic attention spans. Of course, many of those words are readers', left in comments. So thanks for talking to us, indulging us and providing some motivation to keep writing. It's better than working.

i'm thinking about going to this panel, even though there have already been approximately 3200 panels exactly like it, with exactly the same participants saying exactly the same things. but, you know, i am going to study new media, so i figure i should attend at least one of these things before i head off to school. anybody interested? it's a chance to heckle the increasingly-hated wonkette and the man of a thousand opinions.

i also find it funny that they have invited several prominent bloggers to liveblog the event. how much more annoyingly meta can you get?

has anybody else noticed the small-but-growing wonkette backlash edging in on the blogosphere?

taking advantage of the collective hivemind of the blogosphere...

disconcerting, to say the least, thought not at all unexpected from an administration who only looks favorably on the free press if it agrees to act as their propoganda tool (see: jeff gannon):

The White House, intent on continuing to crank out "video news releases" that look like television news stories, has told government agency heads to ignore a Government Accountability Office memo criticizing the practice as illegal propaganda.

In a memo on Friday, Joshua Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget, said the lawyers the White House depends on disagree with the GAO's conclusions.

Accompanying Bolten's memo was a letter from Steven Bradbury, principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, who said video news releases "are the television equivalent of the printed press release."

...Comptroller General David Walker of the GAO said Monday that his agency is "disappointed by the administration's actions" in telling agency heads to ignore the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress.

"This is not just a legal issue, it's also an ethical matter," Walker said. "The taxpayers have a right to know when the government is trying to influence them with their own money."

We've been enjoying a flurry of technology purchases over here at zunta HQ. I'm sure Catherine will be introducing you all to her new laptop shortly. For my part (and as you've no doubt been irritated to find out if you've seen me in the past few days), I'm the proud owner of a new Sidekick 2.

It's pretty slick -- yeah, it's a little longer than my old color sidekick, but it's also flatter and lighter. And dig that color scheme! Very imperial stormtrooper. Better battery life and reception are on the feature list, but surely most important is the ability to buy useless accessories. I can even get it bedazzled!

Also included is the de rigeur shitty digital camera. It's not too bad in daylight:

did you know that D.C. has not one, not two, but three upscale lifestyle magazines launching in the next several months? already on the scene for several years is washingtonian, which caters to upper-middle classes suburbanites.

i'm all for recasting the perception of D.C. as a style-free town, but this is getting a little bit ridiculous. what's even stupider is that i believe at least one of the upcoming publications (can't remember which) doesn't even plan to be based in the district - they'll be editorializing on what's hip in the city from PENNSYLVANIA.

A few weeks back I wondered how the US economy could survive globalization and a bunch of friends wrote to me, both in comments and email, with helpful explanations and pointers toward various resources. Well, I at least learned that other, smarter people feel confident that everything will be just fine, dear.

But now things are starting to snap into focus. So what if we can't make pop culture, goods or services better than the developing world? We don't need comparative advantage for salvation -- we just need to start offering tax incentives to the magic bean industry.

Slashdot's got a story up today about gold farming in massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (delightfully abbreviated as MMORPGS). For a three-panel primer on gold farming, see this Penny Arcade comic strip. Or just listen to me.

See, MMORPGS are serious time commitments. Over the course of months or years you play a single character amongst a world of other human players, each dilligently guiding their avatar through successive levels of virtual proficiency. Frequently the tasks that must be performed to level up are pretty rote and boring -- find the same kind of monster and kill it over and over again, hoping this one will drop some gold or a rare piece of equipment. Elaborate virtual economies exist within these games, with auction houses, banks, and players grouping together and pooling resources as sorts of unregulated corporations (whose mission statements, if they had any, would always revolve around leveraging synergies to proactively kill monsters). As Clive Thompson Edward Castronova semi-famously discovered, one of these games, Everquest, has the world's 77th largest economy.

How can you arrive at a number like that when it's all just make-believe? Actually, as Thompson found, it's pretty easy: you can buy these make-believe currencies with real money. IGE is among the highest-profile of these traders. Right now a piece of gold in Everquest 2 can be bought for a shade under 45 cents; 20 million credits on Star Wars: Galaxies' "Shadowfire" server can be had for $150 dollars.

Here's where gold-farming comes in: it's really fucking boring to amass gold in these games. So these online currency exchanges pay people to sit in the game, stand by creature spawn points, kill them and collect the dropped currency and items. This has created problems for other, casual players of the games: for one thing, the not-actually-that-delicate monster ecosystem is thrown out of whack. For another, spoiled fourteen year olds can use mommy's VISA to ascend to the games' highest levels of mastery -- levels that rightly belong to the world's 40 year old virgins! Because while the meek shall inherit the earth, surely the geek should get dibs on the internet.

So the gold farmer is reviled by players, and companies are cracking down on them. But I think this might be just the sort of industry that the US should embrace. A promising sign is that American virtual currency trading houses are reputed to frequently hire Chinese gold farmers. That's right: we're already outsourcing the labor portion of the pretend economy we've set up! I envision a world where the invisible hand guides a cursor between a game window and its web browser, watching its bank ballance edge skyward as a happy customer on the other side of the world accepts delivery on a few kilobytes' worth of enchanted battle axe.

Special bonus benefit: with such a controllable and idealized set of market conditions, denizens of reality might actually be able to get the world's economists to leave us alone! Everybody wins!

Now: who wants to get in on the ground floor of a promisingly non-substantive business venture?

so for the past few days i've been sick (headachey, sore throat, cough), and continue to be so. blogging will probably be a little light from my side. but i wanted to do you a foodie favor while i'm out of commission. tommy and i, as much as we may dislike her and her skinny chicken neck, have discovered that giadia de laurentiis of "everyday italian" has a can't-beat recipe for chocolate zabaglione. it's, like, five ingredients total, takes about 15 minutes to whip up, and, when spooned over strawberries, is absolute heaven.

check it out. guar-ahn-teeed to get you laid!

I just overhead a promo for PRI's "The World". From their website, here's the synopsis of today's show:

Terrorism and the Internet
Terrorist experts meeting in Madrid say hate language on the Internet has blossomed. Some want to shut down the 4,000 known terrorist websites. Others say more Internet access is needed. Unfiltered news and open communication could be the best weapon in the war against terrorism.

Jackanapes!

This time it isn't Linux running on your ipod -- it's Linux running off of your ipod. Load up the files and no matter how boned your PC becomes, you can boot into a version of Linux, complete with GUI, restore utilities and other goodies.

Sounds pretty neat, but it's actually somewhat more pointless than it sounds. Not all PCs can boot from USB devices yet, for one thing. For another, there are already plenty of Linux "live CDs" available: pop em in your CDROM drive, power up, and try out a new operating system -- all without installing a thing. Less sexy, I guess, but more practical. Have a look at Knoppix if you're feeling curious; if you're feeling mischievous, have a look at PHLAK.

I imagine Catherine or Kyle will have a full review up on DCist later today, but last night's Ash/Bravery show didn't disappoint. Kyle already has some thoughts on the show posted -- he was a little let down by the lack of new material.

For a more casual fan like myself, though, the setlist was dead on. Sorry to say, I haven't kept up with Ash since Nu-Clear Sounds and had never seen them live. This was their first DC show in two years, so perhaps that figured into their decision to play a wide selection from their catalog. Whatever the reason, I appreciated hearing material I knew in addition to their new stuff.

The performance was proficient and professional -- loud, in tune, melodic and energetic. All I can say is, "That's how it's done." If there's any justice, Jet will spend the afterlife carrying an infinite pile of Ash amps to a club at the top of a mountain. (Across the valley, instruments perpetually recede from the grasp of the members of Rush -- I've got this all figured out.)

Oh, and bonus points for their unintentional rock & roll psychic act, which went like this:

ASH: We're going to play an older song or two for you...
ME: I hope it's gonna be "A Life Less Ordinary"
ASH: This one's called "A Life Less Ordinary"

And then they pulled a quarter out of my ear! Amazing.

On to The Bravery: I wanted to hate these guys, blind and uninformed as I was. My experience of them was limited to having seen a single underwhelming video, and I was harboring a grudge from a lack of Ash encores. I couldn't deny them, though -- they're a very good live band. But Catherine and I still opted for a mid-set ride home.

Like I said, it's not that The Bravery aren't a good band. It's just that we seem to have segued smoothly from electroclash to dance rock to Cure-dependent new wave without a break, and my tolerance for synths and eye makeup is fading pretty quickly. I get that the garage rock craze couldn't go the distance, but I'd be very happy if our next musical fad came from somewhere besides New York. The ball's in your court, Canada! Or rink. Whatever. Hell, I don't know.

...to get your ass over to biddy mulligan's at 1500 new hampshire ave nw this evening for the saint paddy's DCist happy hour. i will be in attendance, though not drinking unfortunately, due to both a pesky throat thing and a 6 mile race tomorrow. but i encourage you all to come, to drink heavily, and to bitch/rave about DCist.

Well, looks like Maryland lost to Clemson while I was in a meeting, all but ending their hopes for an NCAA bid. Keep this page open, and your eyes peeled for flames!

Charles says that ACC tourney tickets are going for about $50 a pop outside of the MCI Center. That's a little rich for my blood, but it's sad that I'll be missing Pete Gillen's last game coaching for Virginia tonight. Uncle Pete, we used to call him. Well, I did, anyway.

good lord. i just happened to look down the sidebar of my gmail inbox, and noticed i have 50 invites! i know these things are about as common as iPods, but if you happen to be in need one of, shoot me an email.

i haven't done any "Lost" blogging in a while, and with the show in reruns until mid-april or so, i won't be doing any for the forseeable future. but i received a comment yesterday evening on some show theories that i think deserves some really serious consideration, so here it is. discuss.

Name: Taodallan

Comments:

I can't beleive none of you have thought about the possibility thats its aliens. let me give some reasons why i think its aliens.

- 1. the mystery numbers that were found on a transmition 16 or so years ago that the french lady changed. the numbers make weird things happen.

-2. the radio tower that was on the island before the shipwreck

-3. The weird bunker( Spaceship?) that has the numbers on it.

-4. Ethan not being on the plane in the first place and being extremely agile and strong

-5. Walts mysterious ability to make weird things happen (possibly a later connection with him and the numbers)

-6. the cable going into the ocean definatly spells out some sort of underground facility or spaceship

-7. the voices Saheed and Sawyer heard

-8. Saheed saying when he got back from the frech lady "were not alone" a common alien cliche.

-9. The dead bodies from 60 or so years ago...possible dead aliens or original inhabitants of the island.

-10. the polar bears and the compass..both impling a normally cold climate....(aliens changed the climate to fit there liking)

thats about it but i would say that aliens are a BIG possibility.

but who really knows all we can do is wait. And ...unfortuantly because of its success we probably wont find out the full story for another 2 or 3 seasons. oh well more to watch and hypothesis about than.

schedule of events for the next few days:

thursday: ash/the bravery concert at the black cat. i am prepared to be overwhelmed at the number of hipsters.

friday: DCist happy hour from 5-8 p.m. at biddy mulligan's. if it's anything like last time, it should be fun. a little too fun.

saturday AM: i'm running, along with julie, naomi, and brian, the saint patrick's day 10k. yes, i'm looking forward to my first race since the marathon in october. i've done minimal training, and should be able to pull it off without my lungs collapsing.

saturday PM: you tell me!

remember my post a while back about bush speech set designers going for that inspiring "nazi high school of doom" look during a talk on education?

well, they're back! via lowculture, check out the happy go-lucky look bush has chosen for a speech about the national energy policy.

Catherine posted a link to Ted Leo doing a "Since U Been Gone / Maps" medley yesterday, but it was just a streaming video with a badly compressed audio track. Stereogum's got an at-least-better quality mp3 up today, though -- go have a look.

Second, that Kidz Bop version of "Float On" that had been pulled from the internet before my lame ass heard about it? You can find it here, but who knows for how long. It's mostly just "eh", but if you're like much of the rest of the blogosphere and hearing kids sing about hitting cop cars TOTALLY BLOWS YOUR MIND, MAN then you might enjoy it.

a lot of bloggers have been linking to this auto-generating HTML list, which bolds the states you've been to, underlines the states you've lived in, and italicizes the one you're in right now.

but i think something that leaves a bigger impact is the states visited map generator, which, while it doesn't show where you've lived or how long you've visited a place, therefore giving equal importance to states you've just been to briefly, is kind of a striking visual.

here's my states visited map:

it seems i've cut two huge swaths through the country, and also, that for a life-long liberal east coaster, i've been to my fair share of the red states. actually, growing up, i probably spent the most time in the two most disparate states you could think of: massachusetts and wyoming. i had a set of grandparents in each place, so my summer vacations consisted of eating clam chowder and beaching it up in beautiful rockport, ma., and going horseback riding and rodeo-watching in laramie/cheyenne wyoming. seriously, it's like dick cheney and john kerry had a love child. shudder.

god LORD, harvard students can be arrogant assholes. hillary duff starts taking classes at the university's extension school, and the crimson feels a need to write a bitter, snippy and not-even-close-to-clever editorial about it? leave the poor little celebrity alone. she's just trying to learn real good, y'all hear?

i've been waiting my whole life for this! well, at least the past few weeks:

ted leo covers kelly clarkson's "since you've been gone."

[ginormous hat tip to stereogum]

browsing around the d.c. blogosphere today, i came across a recent post by brooke at obernews concerning my favorite sob-inducing show: extreme makeover:home edition.

I'm not ashamed to say that I cry at almost every episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. You'd have to be practically inhuman not to. There's something satisfying about seeing actual good happen in the world, even for someone as jaded as I fancy myself to be.

you don't want to be sitting next to me if we're watching extreme home makeover on a sunday night together, because it's bound to be awkward and uncomfortable for everyone involved. i usually start off with a few sniffles and an attempt to restrain myself for the sake of tommy and charles' manhoods, because everybody knows boys suffer mental meltdowns when confronted with a female's tears. but unfortunately, the occasional times that i happen to catch EHM always seems to coincide with a monthly bout of PMS, and i usually end up sobbing hysterically into tommy's tear-soaked t-shirt, burbling, "the-hey-hey gave the parents a hot tub and the daughter a schol-hol-arship to the fashion institute of technology! OH MY GA-HAW-HAWD [insert unconstrained wails]!"

in case you haven't ever caught the show, it's hosted by ty pennington, the unbelievably annoying carpenter from trading spaces. every week, ty and his crew of jolly interior designers pick a needy family with a particular affliction (dad's gone off to iraq; son's in a wheelchair; house had a car crash into the living room and they can't afford to repair it; a few weeks ago it was two homeless families) and build them sweet new digs, complete with personalized touches. the whole thing is sponsored shamelessly by sears; the product placements are brazen and abso-fucking-lutely everywhere. sears' logo appears in glowing, angelic light about every fifteen minutes, accompanied by melodic trumpets and what have you.

but i don't really have a problem with this, and neither, thankfully, does brooke:

Between the obscene amount of product placement and the general feeling of goodwill generated by corporate benevolence, there's big money to be made in philanthropy.

As anecdotal evidence, I hadn't been to a Sears in many years, but when faced with the decision between Sears and Marshall Fields one day in Chicago a few weeks ago, I decided to patronize Sears purely because of the warm fuzzy feeling it gave me to contribute in some small way to the Extreme Makeover: Home Edition project. (Let add some weight to this decision by adding that I often make up reasons to visit my mother in Chicago just so I can go to Marshall Fields--that I should forgo a trip to Marshall Fields to visit Sears, of all places, speaks volumes.)

So it wasn't just a nightgown for my mother that I bought: Sears has, in a way, put the very idea of philanthropy up for sale. I didn't have to do anything particularly philanthropic. I bought something that I was going to buy anyway, I came away feeling like I had done something to benefit a good corporation that would in turn do a good deed for a nice family, and Sears made a sale that it otherwise wouldn't have made.

I'm not sure exactly what my point is, but it strikes me as something libertarians generally should be particularly pleased with: whether it's selfishness masquerading as philanthropy or vice versa, there is a strong and thriving market demand for philanthropy. The ratings for EMHE prove it. I'm not suggesting ABC and Sears will be taking over the functions of the welfare state anytime soon, but still, I'd say there's strong support for the argument that communities--with a little help from ABC and Sears or other corporate sponsors (who can easily be convinced to help if it turns a profit)--can take care of their own.

there are plenty of people out there who will argue against me in this point, and i don't blame them, but i have absolutely no problem with sears profiting off EHM. my take is that corporations are going to do whatever they can to maximize profits and sales anyway, so they may as well throw some philanthropy into the mix, right? i know and accept the fact that my perception of sears and any other company contributing to the show are being totally manipulated, but if i'm going to be manipulated by ads, environment, social constructs anyway, why not have it be in this manner?

a while back when tommy and i were discussing the show, i believe he brought up the point that shows like this are ridiculous, because a) they exploit the subjects and b) it seems as if they're doing a lot for poverty, when really, they aren't doing very much; they don't help out a large number of families, and the money could be better spent on federal programs or in another more large-scale manner. i agree with all of this, but i can't get past the fact: corporations and tv execs are going to do bad, manipulative stuff anyways that's not going to help anyone except their bottom line. so why not take on this format and help out a family here or there along the way?

but maybe i'm just a sucker. feel free to slam my naive ass in comments.

UPDATE: in comments, both kriston and scott have pointed out good reasons why i am indeed a naive sucker, and today slate has an article on the ever-annoying ty pennington, which is mostly positive but reveals:

What we're saying is, Ty is not an excessively introspective creature. His do-gooding can be so relentless that it sometimes leaves its recipients in a pinch. As Newsweek has pointed out, an Extreme Makeover makeover could add thousands of dollars in new property taxes—which, in all likelihood, the owners couldn't afford. Last year, Ty led his troops on a mission to house on a depressed block in Watts, in South Central Los Angeles. The team performed its usual miracles, never bothering to consider the social consequences of erecting a fortress that towered over every other house on the block. And then there's the nagging feeling that building a 5,300-square-foot home, however magnanimous an act, may not be the most appropriate solution for a problem like sewage backup.

Quick note: BitTorrent 4 has been released. You don't need to do anything just yet, but you might want to start looking for updates to your BT client of choice.

The biggest change: BT traffic will now be marked with the "bulk data" tag. Supposedly this'll improve download speeds and lessen BT's impact on latency-sensitive applications like VoIP. In practice I'm guessing it'll mainly be used by ISPs to throttle your BT download speeds -- so there's another reason to wait. I'm sure somebody will offer a configuration option to flip the bulk data tag off.

can i just say how much the internets rock? and blogs? pretty awesome, too. because through the web and unrequited narcissism, i've discovered two lovely ladies who are poised to be helpful, friendly contacts as i figure out this grad school thing: elana, a current medill student who long ago commented on this site, gave much thoughtful commentary through email, and who offered to show me the D.C. medill newsroom tomorrow then let me buy her a drink at indebleu so i can relentlessly pick her brain. then there's avery, whom i discovered through the magic of technorati; one day i was searching frantically for blogs that said something, anything, about medill or berkeley; i came across mockorange, realized she was in the same boat as i was regarding applications, then was thrilled to read she was accepted the very same day.

also big ups to susan, recently returned from tajikistan. she was just accepted into the master's program of international relations at the university of chicago. here's hoping she goes there so we can go on wild, drunken benders through the city and then, um, blog about it.

phew! that was a close one. turns out that al-quaeda correctly surmised that smashing planes into the world trade center and killing thousands of people wouldn't have terrorized americans enough - they might have also been plotting to kidnap russell crowe as part of a plan to "culturally destabilize" the united states:

The Australia-based Crowe told GQ magazine in an interview that he received FBI protection throughout the filming of "A Beautiful Mind" and for part of "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World." He also was flanked by undercover agents at the Golden Globe awards ceremony in 2001.

When asked who might have been targeting him, Crowe replied: "Um ... well, that was the first conversation in my life that I'd heard the phrase al Qaeda."

..."I don't think that I was the only person (targeted). But it was about -- and here's another little touch of irony -- it was about taking iconographic Americans out of the picture as a sort of cultural-destabilization plan," he said.

wow. close call, that one. let's just hope the terrorists don't go after brad pitt - my world would be turned upside down.

Pitchfork has a profile of Arcade Fire opener Owen Pallett, aka Final Fantasy. It's a nice read without a lot of new information.

Well, except for one thing. It turns out the looming threat of socialist heartthrobs isn't as dire as Kriston and I had thought: Pallett's gay. Phew! That was a close one.

One of my friends has a job that requires him to spend a lot of work hours reading books for background information. This sounded pretty okay to me, but he says it's a pain. It's just hard to read in a work environment, apparently.

Well, now I know what he means. My boss has got me preparing for the Microsoft 70-229 exam, which involves me taking a bunch of practice tests and reading this little gem. I'm not the world's fastest reader, but even by my standards this is slow-going.

But the real problem here is that the whole enterprise is somewhat depressing. I've got my MCAD, after this test it'll be a relative cakewalk to my MCSD, and I'm being submitted for a security clearance. All of these are valuable credentials that will help me earn a reliable wage. Until, that is, my soul has shriveled into a cathode-baked husk and I decide to repaint the corner of the ceiling.

Ever been good at something you dislike? My scoutmaster used to go to his office Christmas parties dressed as the Grim Reaper: the folks at work had figured out that he had a knack for firing people, and as the company's fortunes faded, it became his career.

Now, I don't mean to paint web page development as all that dire -- I am wearing pajamas at the moment, after all. But a little fondness for dabbling with computers can quickly metastasize into a horrifyingly parasitic existence, wherein I'm sustained solely by the putrid blood of the body corporate. TPS reports, people!

Anyway, this is all easy enough to ignore on a day-to-day basis -- we all bitch about white-collar wage-slavery, but obviously things could be a lot worse. Still, for the next few hours I'll be able to tell anyone who cares to ask all about the four different levels of transaction isolation available in Microsoft SQL Server 2000. You can't tell me that isn't a little scary.

kanishka, editing my post about roberto donna over at DCist, alerted me to the fact that my next DCist post will be my 100th. my, how time flies! huh. now i feel like i have to write something really monumental.

over here at ol' zunta, this particular post is something like the 973rd. do we get a gold statue of glenn reynolds or something once we reach a thousand?

fo' real, krauthammer? you so crazy:

Last night (3/7) on Special Report, Brit Hume went to great lengths to continue the spin on the shooting incident that killed Italian intel agent Nicola Calipari & wounded Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena, with a lot of help from one of the most rabid ideologues on his "All-Star" panel, Charles Krauthammer, who said: "She's lucky she wasn't shot as a collaborator."

[via newshounds.us]

Alright, someone has to blink. Yes, the DC blogosphere has kept up a brave face, going through the motions of denial in precise synchrony. Keep your eyes up and a smile on your face. Only later, when the lights are out, the alarm is set, and it's just you and an empty universe -- only then can you let in that flicker of honesty that will inevitably send you plummetting down an endless chasm of despair.

You're a fraud. We're all frauds. Our heroes are weaklings, our imagined power is officious bluster, and the goddamn pandas aren't fooling anybody.

I am, of course, referring to Roberto Donna's shameful performance on last Sunday's Iron Chef: America. Chef Donna, of Galileo, is considered to be one of our city's top 2 or 3 chefs, and while nobody would rank Washington among the foremost culinary capitals of the world, residents like to think the city acquits itself pretty well, subsidized as it is by thousands of lobbyist expense accounts.

Sure, Donna would likely be facing one of the country's foremost Italian chefs in the form of Mario Batali -- victory was not certain, but surely it would be a valiant battle. But wait -- what's this? Batali wouldn't be competing? No, instead Donna faced Masaharu Morimoto, that shock-artist prettyboy. Alright, points for disliking Bobby Flay, but this should have been a walk in the park.

But instead Donna, the region's pride, failed to even meet him on the field of battle: the sack of guts only completed 2 out of the required 5 dishes within the time limit and barely scored half as many points as Morimoto. Oh, Roberto.

did you know weddings are a racket? really, they are. i hadn't really figured this out earlier because i haven't been to a lot of weddings in my 25 years, but after talking with some friends last night, it's totally obvious. weddings are like...a republican institution or something. they're all about benefiting the rich and, um, helping out corporations like, um, pottery barn and williams-sonoma, and giving ridiculous material possessions only to straight folks...whatever. that analogy doesn't really work.

but seriously. i was talking with scott, a groomsman for jason and corbin's impending nuptials, and i found out he a) had to buy an engagement present b) buy a wedding present c) rent a tux d) go back and forth several times between his location and maryland to attend all sorts of crazy shindigs, where he can't even really get drunk or play beer pong or anything and e) attend a bachelor/bachelorette sleepover party, and doesn't that sound like fun, because you see the bride AND the groom will be there with all their friends, and they might make popcorn and watch movies and give each other facials and NOBODY GETS TO BE DRUNK AND KILL STRIPPERS.

really. and if i were to total all the money i'd already spent on this wedding, i would cry big salty tears, because in the past two days i have come to the realization that i am going to have to live like a monk for the next two years because northwestern and the federal government are going to own my souls for the rest of my life. do you want to know what one year at a journalism grad school will cost you? DO YOU? okay. brace yourself. here's northwestern's cruel and unusual estimate of my tuition and living costs for september 2005-september 2006:

Tuition
$35,332

Room & Board
17,020

Books
2,356

Travel
2,108

Personal
4,504

Activity Fee
280

Hospitalization Insurance
2,232

TOTAL
$63,832

HOLY FUCK! this is spectacularly unfair! and unless the "activity fee" includes bottles of whiskey, i'm going to be stone-cold sober all through school. but everybody knows that journalists need to be drunk! alcoholic, even! HOW DARE THEY DEPRIVE ME? don't they want me to learn real good?

this also comes with the fact that a) i just bought a laptop so i can blog drunkenly at will, anytime, anywhere b) long ago, before i realized i would be paying grad school debts until i was 90, i planned a trip to italy in april which will cost me molto euro and c) i recently became aware of the fact that another cost of journalism grad school is that you need a whole new wardrobe. no, really. especially when moving to a hip city like chicago. blazers, tweed skirts, suede messenger bags, flat black boots - my god. oh, and this dress - any journalist worth her salt needs this dress. you've got to look professional.

anyway. of course i am bringing this all on myself, and i know that journalistic careers traditionally reward their participants with high-paying, prestigious jobs. so it should be more or less okay. but you've been warned: for the forseeable future, i'm going on the canned-tuna-and-pasta-diet. and i'm going to be cranky.

UPDATE: think i kid about needing a whole new hip-journalist wardrobe? check out this spread of wonkette in fashion rag lucky magazine, illustrating her day-of-the-week clothing. now, tell me: can you REALLY be a good journalist without that brown leather grommet-studded tote? I THINK NOT.

Check out this photo of Catherine and Scott.

Aww. Doesn't she look pretty and demure?

Yes. Well. Actually, though, she's imitating X-Pac of the WWE, performing his signature crotch chop and accompanying scream: "SUCK IT!"

She's a competitive girl, is all. Despite this, at Julie, Becca and Na's party over the weekend, teammate Brian and I were victorious. The exact details of that victory remain murky, including what it was we were competing at. But rest assured it must have been a devastating loss for Catherine. And even with the heated rivalries, we all had a good time -- thanks, hosts!

It's a beautiful day outside -- what better way to celebrate it than by hunching over your laptop and enjoying a freshly redesigned webpage? Hurrah!

Two things: first, thanks to knautia for generously offering her Flickr photos under a Creative Commons license, allowing me to take and modify the purty cherryblossom photo underneath this text.

Second, our long-suffering IE users might experience somewhat better performance now -- I am, anyway. For one thing, we ditched the gigantic tiling graphic in the sidebar (for now). For another, the 2x1 pixel GIFs that made up some of the tiling stripe elements have been replaced with larger images. A decent web browser would be able to tile tiny images efficiently. Oh well. I know you'd be using something else if you could.

i'm having a hard time out-hipstering myself, so give a girl a hand: should i go to ipod DJ night at saint-ex on wednesday, or indie rock karaoke at dc9? decisions, decisions. suggestions for setlists/karaoke choices are also welcome.

for charles' birthday, and really, because i'm happy to bake at a drop of a hat, i made a hazelnut chocolate torte this evening. the recipe was from epicurious.com, which i only recently discovered and which is also the Best Food Web Site Ever. check it out. recipe, minorly adjusted from the epicurious one, is behind the cut.
definitely recommended, especially for lovers of Baci, aka Your Supreme Chocolate Overlord.

The sad thing is that I've been waiting for months to write this post, hoping for a working proof-of-concept to come online at my office before I recommend the setup to anyone else. Well, let it never be said that the Wheels of Commerce turn quickly. Compared to the Wheels of Wanting To Avoid Driving Out To Fix Your Mom's Computer, they barely turn at all.

See, my mom lives in Annandale, and a month or so ago she acquired a new computer. Being tech support to the world, I have to work on this a lot. Worse, I stupidly got her an iPod shuffle, making my duties as a filial technophile that much more hopeless. I needed a way to get to her computer without getting to Annandale. I found a great solution; maybe you'll find it useful, too.

So what I'm about to outline is a secure way to remotely access your home network using only free software. The secret to this is a great piece of open source software called OpenVPN. Not only is it free, it's in many ways preferable to commercial VPN products that use the overly complex and problem-ridden IPSec specification. With OpenVPN set up you can securely use any resource on your LAN, be it a file share, FTP server or printer. You can even remotely control your computers by using another free application called VNC. It's this application that lets me manage my mom's computer by remote, so I'll cover installing that, too.

so, did anyone else think that "the aviator" was, like, THE WORST MOVIE EVER MADE?

good lord in heaven. what a waste of three hours.

Thank goodness we have the Washington Post's cultural critics to keep us all on the cutting edge. This weekend's edition brings us news of a fascinating new musical phenomenon -- "britpop", I think it's called? Staff writer Sean Daly clues us in:

The tortured blokes of Brit-pop -- your Coldplays, your Radioheads, your Keanes -- are friends to the friendless, lovers of the loveless, sad-sack salves for the brokenhearted. These pasty-faced dealers in shimmering soundscapes, chiming guitars and big, bittersweet hooks are in desperate need of a shrink, and yet, at the same time, they adore their goopy vulnerability and unshakable malaise. When Travis's Fran Healy lamented "Why Does It Always Rain on Me?," the 2001 hit song that best typifies the genre, the wee wuss wasn't looking for an answer; he was simply searching for like-minded Eeyores to join him in the puddles.

Come on now. You can enjoy music bearing heavy emotional content without being a mopey navel-gazer. It's kind of like how you can watch and appreciate a performance of Hamlet without stabbing and/or poisoning everyone around you. If that's too difficult a concept for you to grasp and approach with a modicum of respect, I suggest you stick to your Smashmouth box sets.

Via Slashdot, check out this article. A UCSD grad student named Tadayoshi Kohno has published an interesting paper outlining a way to fingerprint computers remotely.

The trick is to analyze the timestamps on packets. Like a postmark, timestamps are sometimes applied to outgoing parcels of data to help the routing systems that will carry them work more efficiently: knowing when a message originated can help order it, determine when clogs occur, and otherwise optimize traffic.

The sneaky part is Kohno's realization that these timestamps might reflect a phenomenon called clock drift. See, the crystal in your computer doesn't keep perfect time -- it's more precise than accurate, incrementing a very reliable amount that is usually somewhat different from the intended amount. As time passes, the clock gets further and further out of sync with "real" time. Thanks to handy software, your clock might resynchronize with an online atomic clock or otherwise be periodically adjusted, but the rate of drift remains fairly constant. Kohno has shown that even though the clock used for timestamps is usually one or more layers abstracted from your system clock, it still reflects the same drift -- regardless of your operating system.

The result is that a system could collect an apparently undifferentiable batch of transmissions from a group of computers, then sort them out by their clock drift. Even if your physical location, IP address, operating system and connection method all change, you can be fingerprinted based on your clock drift. And it can be done from anywhere on the internet.

Time to start furiously deleting those naughty BitTorrent downloads? Well, not yet. The process only extracts six bits of significant data -- get a crowd of more than 60some computers together and some of the clock drifts will be statistically identical. Still, you can bet the NSA and other internet boogeymen are paying attention to this: as a supplemental means of identification, it could be pretty useful for tying together seemingly-unconnected pieces of evidence, as if a series of mailbombs with varying postmarks were suddenly all found to be addressed in the same handwriting.

The real fix would be to drop the timestamps -- they're not a mandatory part of the TCP/IP spec. I'm sure some paranoid open source hackers will roll out a Linux distro that does just that, but it seems unlikely that Microsoft and Apple will see any value in doing so. A more likely mainstream fix? Someone will write a little system-tray app that constantly jiggers your clock by a few fractions of a millisecond. Keep your darting eyes peeled, my friends.

For those somehow unaware, Charles is Catherine and my roommate. And today's his twenty-fifth birthday! Wow. Sniff -- they grow up so fast. It's hard to believe it's been a whole year since the last time I bought Charles drinks until he threw up. I guess that'll make tonight a trip down memory lane.

It's nice to have traditions.

many questions that nobody has yet asked me about grad school but which i am prepared to answer, especially because i am the Future of New Media Journalism and one day people will look back on on this blog and marvel at its humble beginnings and want to know how it all started before i pass away and have my ashes shot out of a cannon or fed to a wild african lion to complete the circle of life or what have you, and it is important to document your intents and purposes for the little people.

so. where are you gonna go?
good question! this fall, i only applied to three places: university of maryland, northwestern, and berkeley. some people urged me to apply to columbia or missouri, but i never really considered those because the idea of moving to NYC or missouri would make me want to dig out my own eyeballs and cook them for dinner. for the most part, i always secretly told myself that if got into northwestern, i'd go. problem is, i found out i got into berkeley before i found out about northwestern, and thus had many hours to imagine myself making napa valley my playground, sipping wine with michael chiarello, and generally communing with nature. i'm still holding on to that sunny dream. but probably northwestern.

you know that chicago is kind of cold, right?
i have heard vague rumors of this coldness, but one thing a good journalist is supposed to do is not believe anything unless presented with facts. so this whole "being frozen into a meat popsicle" thing will have to wait until i can see it for myself.

so, like, are the facts that you are a lazy writer, a sloppy speller, and can't understand an issue more complex than your pinky finger of a concern to your journalistic future?
not really!

well, they worry me. a lot.
don't worry too much. i'm not going to journalism school to be a political magazine writer or a daily newspaper reporter, as worthy and interesting as those jobs may be. yes, writing and reporting is a "big part" of my "education," but i'm in the new media program, baby! which really means I'M LEARNING HOW TO BE A BETTER BLOGGER! or, actually, what i'm really interested in is this crossroads that traditional print journalism and online technology seem to be at. for the past couple of years they've been like two awkward eighth-graders at a school dance, holding each other at arm's length and swaying back and forth to boyz II men while trying to hide their totally out-of-control-budding-sexual-hormone-freakiness. i want to be there to encourage that next step. note: this is not like me advocating that 13 year olds have sex.

so are you freaked out?
yeah, well, i've had that special throwup feeling in my stomach for over 24 hours now, so i guess so. leaving DC is not something that agrees that much with me, especially as i've felt i've just started to really know and enjoy the city in the past year. i feel like i'm just starting to make really important contacts and do better work with DCist and, like, GO OUT and be a normal 25 year old in what i realize is a rather remarkable place. plus, you know, all the people in the world that i love are here. but i've done it before. 2002, i packed up and moved to italy to do a job i knew nothing about and live with people i had never seen before. and it was fantastic. of course, italy didn't turn me into a frozen meat popsicle, so i might not be ready for that. but it's only a year, right?

any other questions? bring em on! i'm gonna be A JOURNALIST, which means i now know the answers to everything!

Have a look at this. And no, despite all indications to the contrary, I am not twelve years old.

ALMOST RELATED BONUS: Kriston sent me this yesterday.

So how about those cell phones? Lots of little parts, huh? Well, see for yourself:

I've at least got a working theory as to what happened. The battery (which still holds a charge) is connected to the system by a just-a-little-too-short ribbon cable. The last time I remember having a working SK in my hand, I was performing a stupid little trick where I toss it while it's opening, and the screen clicking into place sends it whirling into my other hand. In practice it probably just looks like I'm chucking it from one hand to another, but it feels cool -- lots of unexpecting torque and chunky noises and whatnot. Yeah, I'm a dork.

This ill-advised little maneuver probably rattles the insides quite a bit, and my best guess is that this nudged the poorly-designed ribbon cable out of position with the circuitry it's supposed to power. Whoops!

Well, it's great that I think I know what's wrong, but getting this thing back together is a whole other matter. There are five distinct layers going on, a magnet that fell out from god knows where, and I twisted the screen cable more than I should have while trying to disassemble it. With the odds of a successful reassembly plummeting, I think I'll bite the bullet and buy an SK2. Unfortunately, no store in the DC metro region appears to have any in stock.

Oh, and in case anyone stumbles in from google: this guy is who I should have been listening to for disassembly instructions.

how cute are these t-shirts? [via dcist]

Sigh. The sidekick has died! No, not Charles. My phone. It must have been jealous of my ipod. Alas. I'll do my best to drag the ole Ericsson T39 out of its box in the garage tomorrow and start returning voicemail, but in the meantime you should call Catherine, not me. Not that I'm such a social butterfly -- I rarely use even half of my 200 monthly weekday minutes. But still: if you tried to call me and I didn't respond, it's not because I hate you. Probably.

But now I'm faced with a dilemma: what new toy should replace it? As much as I want to buy a Treo 600 or 650, there doesn't seem to be a way to do so and get grandfathered into my very cheap $40/month plan -- and they're pricey gadgets to begin with. Oh well. The sidekick 2 looks pretty rad, too, so I'll probably pick up one of those in the next day or so. I hope you all like terrible-quality digital photos!

i nearly just simultaneously peed my pants and threw up on my computer monitor upon receiving this email:

Dear Catherine:

Congratulations! The Admissions Committee has approved your application to Medill’s Graduate School of Journalism with a concentration in New Media.

Your first quarter in the program will be the “Journalism Methods” package of courses, which is designed for students who have not had professional daily newspaper experience. This quarter consists of a media law and ethics seminar, and intensive work in news writing, beat reporting and copy editing. It is required for approximately 80 percent of our students.

Blah dee blah dee blah blah, buncha other stuff that is probably important, but which i am too delirious to process.

how to pick? the only thing i'm sure of right now is that i'm starting a new blog called "J-school days: the diary of a liberal propagandist-in-training."

i have to apologize if you've been in my company the past 48 hours or so. you may have found me sullen, touchy and, well, bitchier than usual. (which really is kind of balls-out bitchy.) actually, this is really just a public apology to tommy, who's born the brunt of my two-day funk.

you see, late sunday afternoon, i realized that the next day would be monday, march 1st. i don't particularly hate march, but this year it signified something different. something scary. something flat-out terrifying. march 2005 is, for me, the Month of Graduate J-School Applications.

and...you know what? i was going to try to write some sort of funny, meaningful, supsenseful post with an interesting narrative and some good storytelling, but really. screw that.

I FUCKING GOT INTO BERKELEY!!!!!

woot. now excuse me while i go pour myself a glass of wine and peruse the pages of FAFSA's web site.

since i'm incapable lately of stringing two coherent thoughts together (both in bloglife and real life), i'm going to indulge a link round up.

The Post has got an article up today covering the current state of the online music services. It's fairly content-free, but mostly inoffensive: some college kids say they'll buy all their music when they graduate, and some industry execs think they're finally finding their way in the digital age. Of course, virtually every engineer I knew in college thought they'd be making six figures immediately after graduation, and the music industry's online strategy involves suing twelve year-olds. There's no reason to pop either of these bubbles: they're self-popping. Just wait.

But the article does spew a bit of misinformation toward the end that's worth correcting.

The company that did the most to get legal downloading off the ground may also be the lead weight on a market whose consumers like to shift among different players and services, taking their libraries with them. In addition to shutting out Napster, Apple also prompts iPod owners to use iTunes as their PC media player and online music store, making it difficult or even impossible to buy tracks from other retailers and move them directly to their devices. About 90 percent of the hard-drive-based music players sold in the United States are iPods, according to Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster.

"Apple has opted to keep iPod proprietary and not let people who own them choose how they want to get digital music," Harris said.

Representatives for Apple reached by telephone and e-mail repeatedly declined to be interviewed for this story. While its adherence to a proprietary model may eventually become an obstacle to widespread adoption, Apple's strategy is sound business and unlikely to change any time soon, said Gartner G2 analyst Mike McGuire.

"In a perfect world it would all be interoperable, and everybody would make money, but in a market-driven world, is there a business case to be made for making the iPod interoperable? I don't know," McGuire said. Apple chief Steve Jobs "is doing what any business would do," he added.

Ah, "journalistic balance". In this case, though, the fair and balanced other side is, "That's the market for you! Apple's doing what it's got to do!"

But painting Apple as the outlier is inaccurate. Microsoft has assembled a consortium of content providers and portable player manufacturers around its WMA format, and the Post is acting like this is a well-respected standard. It's not. Apple has the larger marketshare, and its preferred AAC format -- unlike WMA -- is an ISO standard that can be used by programmers without paying licensing fees to Microsoft. It's also considered to be technically superior. With a quarter billion songs sold and commanding marketshare in the portable player market, it's Microsoft and its PlaysForSure consortium that's bucking the standard.

Shame on the Post for falling for MS's ridiculous marketing. Sure, Bill has assembled a broad coalition of allies, but they're the ones attempting to assert a proprietary stranglehold on the market. They're facing an uphill battle that can't be won on the merits -- so it'll be PR efforts like this article that lead the way. They're counting on stooge articles like this one.

Oh, and that bit about iPod users having no choices besides iTunes? Not true. Not at all.

i must admit, i've had my doubts about the blogosphere and its abilities to save humanity, feed the hungry, land a human on mars, etc. but i was clearly wrong; i'm ready to get down on my knees and worship its incomparable powers.

this is because there is A BLOG ABOUT PURSES OUT THERE. for the love of god, why did it take me so long to discover this gem? think of all the wisdom and crocodile skin and leather - OH, the leather! - that i've been missing out on.

excuse me, but i have some drooling to go do.

UPDATE: OH MY GOD! THERE ARE MORE THAN JUST ONE PURSE BLOG OUT THERE. I AM SO HAPPY.

related:
>> stylemaven
>> closet spy

Take that, mainstream media!

Everything, I tell you: blogging will change everything.