Raleigh’s Serendipitous Downtown

Today I was head-down, working on customer issues when my coworker mentioned he was going for a walk and invited us to join him. The next thing I know, the whole office (all four of us today) left the office and took a leisurely stroll around Fayetteville Street in the bright May sunshine.

While we were out walking, I noticed the way I was chuckling at my buddies’ jokes. It’s not because I don’t usually laugh, but my chuckling was almost subconscious – just really from the heart, you know? I realized I was enjoying the walk much more than I had expected.
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Mexican Radio

What does he say? Watch their awesome video, which still rocks after 25 (!) years.

Mexican Radio
Wall of Voodoo

I feel a hot wind on my shoulder
And the touch of a world that is older
I turn the switch and check the number
I leave it on when in bed I slumber
I hear the rhythms of the music
I buy the product and never use it
I hear the talking of the DJ
Can’t understand just what does he say?
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More Myth

I watched some videos with MythTV last night and tested the commercial skip feature. It was flawless! I’d been disabling this feature because the mythcommflag process puts a load on my measly 1 GHz backend server: enough to make the server unsuitable acting both as a backend and a frontend. As long as I’m using a separate frontend, though, things work just fine. The commercial skipping is definitely worth the extra CPU cycles.

I’m still wowed by this tool. What’s really unique about MythTV is the way it slices up what we used to know as television. Tivo, the trailblazing PVR, gave us the ability to treat a television program like a book: you can walk away from the program and “pick it up” the next time you had time to watch.
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Phishing attempt is stoped

This just arrived in my inbox. Someone obviously didn’t read my earlier post:

From: “Google-AdWords-Noreply” support at google.com
To: markt at blahblahblah.blah
Subject: Your AdWords Google Account is stoped.

My account is stoped. My God, how could this have happened?

I Can’t Watch This

Inspired by my MythTV tinkering…

I Can’t Watch This
Weird Al Yankovic

I can’t watch this. I can’t watch this
I can’t watch this. I can’t watch this

My my my my TV makes me so bored
Makes me say, oh my lord
What is this garbage here?
Wanna cover my eyes and plug my ears
It sucks, and that’s no lie
It’s about as much fun as watching paint dry
Lowers my IQ one notch
And that’s the reason why, uh, I can’t watch
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Good description of the Debian/Ubuntu security flaw

Linux users often like to poke fun at Microsoft Windows for being prone to security attacks. Now the joke’s on Linux users: at least Debian and Ubuntu ones. It seems for over two years these distros were hashing their SSH/OpenVPN and other OpenSSL-generated keys using entropy that wasn’t quite entropic. Thus, the keys are easily guessable – a colossal security mistake.

My friend Mike B. sent me a link to DailyTech’s excellent description of the gaffe. It’s well worth a read.

We own the greenway!

We took a family bike ride along the greenway and got to the Mecca of greenway riding: Shelly Lake! That’s about 8 to 10 miles away from our house (and then 8-10 back)! It took about an hour each way but the whole family did a fantastic job.

More soon. Nap time now. 🙂