Should you leave your rack-mounted servers insecure, the wily H4xx0r Pigs will r00t you. No matter how cute and fuzzy they look, they’re dangerous.

Hmm, less to report than I thought. The bus driver took the wrong exit when driving us back to Tempe on Monday, which added about 15 minutes to the commute. OK, I was kicking back and reading Olympos, not actually driving, but it was still a bit annoying. That book takes the Trojan War as depicted in the Iliad and basically turns it on its ear, adding war machines from the asteroid belt, people impersonating the Greek gods, teleportation, horrible alien threats from outside, atomic weapons, and plot twists that Homer would’ve had a cow about. It’s interesting but not as good as Dan Simmons’s most famous books, Hyperion and its sequels.

The economic OMGWTFBBQPANIC currently happening may have one small benefit for me. Since Chase is taking over WaMu, if they take over all of WaMu’s branch offices, I’ll have a Chase bank about 0.6 miles away.

I don’t think that guinea pigs would want to wear costumes, but maybe they do.

Sunday was a lot less eventful than Saturday. Tons of laundry, returning library books and getting new ones, spending a few hours fiddling with some test stuff for work, and stuff like that filled most of the day. I also looked up “Macbeth 3000″ on IMDB and found that it was apparently much better than it sounded from the brief description I’d gotten. Hm, I might actually want to watch that at some point, and not as part of “Bad Movie Night” either.

On Saturday afternoon/evening, we executed the Furniture Moving Party. The living room of the condo was rearranged to better take advantage of stuff, and make it so that a bunch of people could more comfortably hang out in front of the TV.

It all worked pretty dang well.  We spent a lot of time eating and shopping for additional songs on “Rock Band”, where we ended up downloading about 12 songs.  Then we played them, which was pretty cool.  I was surprised to learn that other people liked Bad Religion’s “Sorrow” and wanted to download it—it’s a fairly punk-esque song that isn’t apologetic about anything.  Oh well, it was fun to sing and play.  We also got a few of The Who’s songs.  If it hadn’t been for Rock Band, I never would’ve listened to The Who, oddly enough.  There are too many gaps in my musical education.

The main problem we had was figuring out what to do with all the food we had left over.  Other people took the chocolate cake and tres leches cake, which meant that I was left with a bunch of chips.  Oh well, that’s easy to take care of.

Very late on Friday night, I found the cellphone that I thought I’d lost on Tuesday. Somehow, it had ended up under my bed, so far back and to the right that I didn’t see it when I looked under the bed on Wednesday.  Good grief.  Well, I really needed a new phone anyway.  I can afford a small amount for a phone that doesn’t look like a heavily abused Luddite Special.

The grocery store didn’t have exactly the right ingredients for my semi-famous pans of Bonehead Enchiladas.  This means they’ll taste a bit different from how they’ve tasted in the past.  Oh well.  As far as I know, most of the core group are going to show up on Saturday afternoon.  Furniture moving, Rock Band, delicious cake, and stuff like that should occupy us for a few hours.  It should be a good time.

Cats hate being dressed up. If this one had opposable thumbs, he would’ve gone for his six-shooter.

Apparently, it’s possible to completely hork up a Microsloth Exchange server by asking it to deliver 9 messages, each one about 30M in size, to 10 people. “Enterprise” e-mail system, my left hind arse. postfix, exim, sendmail, and qmail can all be set to say 550 Message too big, take off, you hoser if you try to send something larger than a limit (usually 10M, but that’s up to the person in charge of the machine.) Well, this should not surprise anyone.

I should have a new phone by Monday or Tuesday of next week. It would have been much sooner, but I found that I could order a phone for about $100 cheaper over the Net than I could get from a meatspace store. Money über alles. Well, if there’s an emergency or something, I have my work phone.

On Thursday, I forgot to put my book in my bag, so I had nothing to do but stare out the window on the bus ride to work. Duh. Well, since it was Thursday, I could pick up a copy of the local alternative paper on the bus ride home. Since they’re not part of “the establishment”, they can take many more controversial points of view about things, and print stuff that offends the living @#$^ out of elected officials. That’s always interesting. A long time ago, I read something that said, “The purpose of journalism is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I feel that too many mainstream news organizations just don’t do that. Mainstream news organizations can’t offend the advertisers, after all.

There’s a growing criminal element among our nation’s bunnies. I don’t know what the good citizens of this country can do about it, either.

And in other news, my cell phone is missing in action.  It was old and I probably needed a new one, but canceling the old one, getting a new one, and having everyone update the stored phone# they have for me will be inconvenient.

The work project is going to be more complex than I had thought. Why this week? I wanted to do a lot of stuff. Oh well.

Trivia: Patty described some sort of run-in with anti-abortion protesters and a pro-choice counter-protester who had a sign with hilarious though R-rated language on it. It was fairly funny, but this is a PG-13 rated site. It looks like many of the group will be available on Saturday, though I don’t have an exact headcount for who’s coming yet.

I’m out of library books, so I’m reading pulp fiction. Blood Rites by Jim Butcher, part of a series of books that inspired a short-lived TV series. This is what I get for planning badly and not finishing Accelerando until Monday night.

After some practice, I’ve found that I can play the drums in Rock Band on Easy on a few of the less difficult songs without immediately failing. This isn’t exactly great, but what the heck. Rome wasn’t burned in a day.

Finished Accelerando. That book has an unusual number of in-jokes that only people who have been deeply involved in computers and Usenet will understand, but it should still be accessible to the average science-fiction fan. Main problem is that Stross isn’t that good at endings. Everything was pretty good until the end, which had absolutely no catharsis at all.

I have a whole bunch of stuff to do at work, as well as the usual social stuff.  So if there’s no entry, or an entry without a picture in the next few days, it’s because I’m too busy.

I don’t think that’s what they meant by “hedge fund”. But giving money to hedgehogs might have been a better investment than the stock market over the last few months.

Went over to Trevor’s on Sunday and played trivia for a few hours. That was interesting. Trevor’s living room is actually smaller than mine, which takes some doing. But somehow, we all fit in and snacked and tried to answer questions about sports, movies, and music.  One of the questions we had talked about a movie titled “Macbeth 3000″, which sounds . . . really bad.  I’m really not sure that a “Macbeth” set in the present could work, since night-vision goggles would easily fix the whole “Birnham Wood comes to Dunsinane” deception, and modern medical tech would mean that Macduff would get born via C-section.  Oh well, maybe we could have “Macbeth 3000″ on a future Bad Movie Night.

My computer desk is a bit larger than it needs to be, and my TV is a CRT, so it takes up more space than it really should. That makes the living room feel smaller than it really is.  Hmm. . . I measured everything and generated an XCF file with separate layers for each major piece of furniture (3 pixels = 1 inch).  Maybe I should find that file and post it.

There are times when it would be really handy to have one of these rocket-propelled chainsaws lying around. I imagine that it wouldn’t be all that stable in flight, but it would look really cool when being used. I am surprised that no director has tried to put something like this in a movie that didn’t go straight to DVD.

Not a whole lot to report, though.  Fuzzball has been even more vocal than usual lately.