Anthrax

No, not the band.

I'm a huge conspiracy buff. UFOs, cryptozoology, Nazis on the moon, etc. are all fun areas of discussion and an interesting look into the human mind. I take everything with a grain (or two) of salt but I like to keep an open mind.

As far as 9/11 goes, I don't believe our government blew up the twin towers, but they sure as hell took advantage of the situation to further a very conservative agenda and the military industrial complex has been well-served by a pervasive fear of the boogie man out to get us and our way of life.

A week after 9/11, letters containing a possible military-grade of anthrax were mailed to several politicians and other high profile people. They invoked all of the keywords to make it seem like yet another Islamist attack with more to come. Politicians and the media at the time went into full scare mode and in some small (or not) way, it helped us get into the current mess we find ourselves in Iraq.

It turns out now that the anthrax came from our very own research labs and the leading suspect (who committed suicide last week) was a conservative (Catholic) Christian. Please read the following article from Salon.com with an open mind. As I said, I love conspiracy theories, but sometimes, there is more than a grain of truth at the heart of something you might dismiss as just another crackpot idea:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/01/anthrax/index.html

A bit of politcs

Normally I don't blog about politics, sex, or religion (I try to avoid discussing them socially so why would I want to bring them up here!) but a thought struck me this morning. We're trying to prop up the current government in Afghanistan and before that and to some degree now it was the warlords. All of whom along with the Taliban use opium as the cash crop to help fund ongoing concerns. Now the end result of opium is to produce drugs for human consumption, the product of which is illegal in many countries including the United States. So to prevent even more poverty and instability in a country we're attempting to save (or at least prevent from reverting to religious fanaticism) we turn a blind eye to the massive opium crops which will eventually turn into product that end up in this country.

Now we have a war on drugs. It's been going on a very long time and it has resulted in thousands of people being thrown in prison. It has not really dented the flow of drugs into the country nor has it done much to affect consumption. People in high school and college still experiment. Meth is easy to manufacture, cheap to buy, and easy to consume. It also ruins lives.

Alcohol is easy to manufacture, cheap to buy, and easy to consume. It also ruins lives. We tried banning alcohol in this country in a similar fashion to the ban on recreational drugs. How well did that turn out? Alcohol was made legal again, but controlled and taxed. We have AA, we have social programs to help those who have unhealthy addictions to alcohol. We put people in jail if they do bad things while under the influence of alcohol. If you sit at home and drink until you pass out, unless you hurt someone else society won't notice and in general could care less. If you sit at home and smoke drugs until you pass out, even if you don't hurt someone, society will call you a drug addict, decry the fall of civilization, and hope you're caught so you can go to jail for 10 to 20.

Why is one drug legal and socially accepted and one is not? Social acceptance is the key word. Society and government specify what is accepted and what is not. Society and the government said in the 1920's said that alcohol was not acceptable and suddenly it was illegal. It was in fact the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. You went to the speakeasies, the bootleggers, or the man down the street cooking corn mash in his back yard.

We have a lot of problems in this country. Many of our citizens are in pain and have issues. Our jails are full of people who if they had been found on the street with an unopened bottle of wine in their hand would never have attracted attention.

I am a drug user because I drink wine. Occasionally a martini. I use alcohol. Never enough to get drunk. Never to forget my problems. Society says I'm a normal, well adjusted person because I use a socially accepted drug in moderation and don't hurt other people or do bad things while under the influence of said drug. In the 1920's, I would have been put in jail due to the amount of wine I have at home because I purchased it and did not make it myself. I have never done any recreational drugs other than alcohol and do not intend to. It ain't my bag baby as Austin Powers would say.

We have a lot of problems in this country. We should concentrate on what tears down society and the people comprising it and worry less about what someone does in the privacy of their own home.

/Rant off

Haiku for the working masses

time slowly drags on
ongoing matters elude
next day holiday

Making sound permanent

So you goof around with an instrument or think you've got a half-descent voice and would like to do voice-overs or radio work. You've got a PC or a Mac, a cheap headset microphone and whatever comes with your OS to record with. Suddenly you find nothing sounds right once you record it and play it back. Want to know why? It's because you need tools specific to the task at hand, making sounds permanent digitally. That's when the trouble starts, the bug bites, the audio geek in you comes out and you find that spending a lot of money is the only way to make it sound "right"!

If you find yourself in this position, check out www.insidehomerecording.com. They have a blog and a great podcast about recording at home. Sure they cover the higher end stuff like Logic Studio and Reason, but they also give tips on how to make Garageband work for you on a modest budget.

ARP via SNMP from Cisco FWSM? It's less common than you think

If you want to get ARP entries out of a Cisco Firewall Service Module, forget about SNMP. You can't. Cisco didn't include the MIB to let you pull that data. You'll need to script something using "expect" or other language to go in and pull it out via the CLI. Rumors are Cisco will support ARP via SNMP in a future software release. Let's hope so.

Scariest Movie ever!

Just four words: Vern Troyer Sex Tape.

There isn't enough eye bleach in the world to make me see that.

Diablo 3

Diablo 3

Having played the last two incarnations of this massive temporal vortex which sucks every minute of every day into its hideous maw, all I can say is I need to block a few months off of any kind of productivity once this bad boy comes out. The game play vids look impressive and interactive environments should add a great deal to the game. Looks like they have another winner on their hands. I'll gladly fork over whatever they will be asking for it.

Bootcamp, XP, and Team Fortress 2

So if you play Team Fortress 2 (and what self-respecting gamer doesn't!) and you happen to be one of the crazy people doing it on a Mac Pro running Bootcamp here's a tip. With the latest update to Bootcamp (2.1) it seems to cause a huge issue for me when running TF2. After about a minute of game play the whole thing locks up. Video drivers? Possibly. I checked and noticed I was still running SP2. You're not supposed to go to SP3 until after the Bootcamp 2.1 patch. So I applied SP3, rebooted and ran TF2 again. Magic! Everything works as it should.

Web 2.0 false start #3

Or 4? I can't keep track. Every time there is a new Web 2.0 gizmo/social networking paradigm shift I usually give it a try oh, about a year after everyone else has. Which means I'm usually putting words out into the great unwashed ether about the time the 10-20 year olds have bailed on it for the next best thing. Of course, since I'm 40 and don't pretend to be hip to write for various IT magazines or websites, that's about right!

So here we go again. Once more into the breech, etc.