pulling tulips

Hooray for fall television! Shows I like are back in season, and I've found a few new shows to love. So far...

Old shows:

- Heroes is off to a strong start. New twists and turns... though there are still some slightly annoying plotlines. At least we haven't had to deal with the Las Vegas psycho woman plot yet.

- Top Chef is almost over. Only a few weeks 'til Project Runway!!

- Doctor Who is almost over as well. This latest season has been EXCELLENT! What a creative show. And a hot Doctor.

- Beauty and the Geek. The geek kicked off this week was cute... he didn't even need a makeover to help him out! It's a shame he's gone.

- House? Hmmm... it doesn't seem to be improving. I'm not terribly optimistic.

- The IT Crowd, Season 2. Over already.... Alas. It was entertaining, but not as funny as Season 1. Regardless, my newly ordered DVDs are on their way. Oh, in case you haven't heard the bad news, there's a chance this show might not be recreated for the US market. Sad, isn't it?

New shows:

- PUSHING DAISIES! What a bizarre, random, hilarious show! Ever since I saw the first commercial I've been looking forward to seeing it. It lived up to my expectations. It may even have exceeded my expectations... FAAAN-tastick!

- Kid Nation - Kid logic is great. That show is highly entertaining. It's all about kids living off the land exactly as people lived in the Old West. It's true -- they have to rely on outhouses, water pumps, and microwaves. It's seriously bare bones.

- Bionic Woman - You never know with remakes, but this one looks promising.

- Life, Moonlight, and Journeyman - BOOOORING. Sorry, writers and producers, but they're complete snoozers.

off with their heads!

On Saturday, Emily and I made our annual pilgrimage to Crownsville, Maryland for the Renaissance Festival. As usual, it was a great people watching opportunity. Apparently the Food Network was filming there all day. I saw some girl getting some guy's autograph, but who he was, forsooth, I knoweth not.

Here is my summary of the day in pictures... pictures of Emily, mostly. Behold:

Ye olde sword swallower:

Fair Maid Emily getteth her haire done:

Thine faire maide in a flattering pose:

Alas, poor Yorrick. I can't see thee:

Ye olde construction workers:

Emily falleth into love with ye olde blond guy while gettething henna applied to her foot:

Ye olde fancy henna application that turned out better than the henna we got in Marrakesh:

Ye olde vikings in an ancient mode of communication. And elephants, which we didn't ride (because of ye olde long line):

Ye olde sideways picture:

Henna update:

Ye olde hypnotist, leading ye olde crowde in their dramatic death scenes:

Ye olde high schooler a little bit too into this activity. Where'd his shirt go??

Ye olde Food Network person signing an autograph:

The joust:

It was very, very dusty, which looked kinda nice in the light of the setting sun:

One last henna picture:

A nearby haunted looking building. Initially we thought it was called the "Hung Young Building" (appropriate for a haunted hospital). Nay, it was just "Hugh Young." Actually, it's "Hvgh Yovng":

After the Renaissance Festival we went to Baltimore for an AMAZING Andrew Bird concert. But that's a story for another blog entry...

yer plans fer t'morrow

Hooray, and dinna spare the whip! T'morrow (19th o' September) is Talk like a Buccaneer Day, Yaaarrrr! I be informing ye o' a few useful links so ye can celebrate th' day in some appropriate manner, with a chest full a' booty. Walk the plank!

First, by Blackbeard's sword, th' official talk like a pirate day web site:

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/piratehome.html

What's yer buccaneer name?

http://www.piratequiz.com/

Next, I'll warrant ye, a game called Ninja Loves Pirate (let this day be a day o' truce betwixt th' pro-ninja hax0rs and th' pro-pirate hax0rs):

http://www.ninjalovespirate.com/

Ye wise professor gave an assignment t' his students t' code a program t' convert text t' buccaneer speak:

http://cs.carleton.edu/faculty/dmusican/csti07/pirate.html

And ye wise student sought help from th' online community:

cheating?? ye be th' judge

And, to be sure, th' site that helped me translate:

http://www.insanum.com/convert/

We'll keel-haul ye!

Be a sheep

You have to admit, technology makes it easier to be like everyone else. In the olden days, in remote neighborhoods, you had to go out of your way to figure out what everyone else was doing. I think in those days church was the place you'd go to see the latest trends. Now you can figure out what is popular just by going to the Interweb.

But what can you trust? Google, of course! Google is all knowing. At Defcon I learned about Google Trends, which is a site that shows you the most popular search terms. You can select specific terms to see a graph of their popularity. Graphs make everything scientific and credible... or, in this case, incredible.

I have learned about all sorts of exciting things thanks to Google Trends. For example, I learned of the death of poor Alex the Parrot, an African grey parrot. ALEX apparently is an acronym for "Avian Learning EXperiment." Alex was a genius bird, and probably was smarter than most of the people you know.

Today's hottest search term (so far, but it is early) is "hectometer." Why is that a popular search term??? I suppose people are just odd. Or some rogue botnet it popularizing the term...

Who wants to be a pushover?

I think it's about time for a TV recap. The summer show season is ending, and the fall season is about to begin. I've noticed that a lot of the reality shows are starting to be compressed... shows that took dozens of weeks last year have shrunk to numbers of episodes you can count on only one, two, or three of your hands.

What have I been watching? Let's see...

- Who wants to be a superhero? This show scores high on the ridiculous factor... and yet I continue to watch it. Possible alternate titles include "who wants to get inside Stan Lee's head?" or "who wants to be a follower?" It's all about Stan Lee's inconsistent application of heroic logic. It doesn't matter how well you justify what you do, because if it doesn't match Stan Lee's predefined expectation, you're gone. Statements like "I'll take that into consideration" translate to "you're as good as out." Don't try to game the system, because his logic and yours probably won't match. For instance, the episode in which everyone nobly rescued the people but got yelled at for not rescuing a dog. Um, okay? Oh, and can you say PRODUCT PLACEMENT?? Sony, esurance, blah blah blah. ECW star "superhero training"??? Yech. "Wrestling, stunt fighting... it's REAL." Double yech. That's exactly what makes me annoyed with the SciFi channel. In a way, it's kind of like those model shows, where people get kicked off for things like getting hypothermia during a photo shoot in freezing cold water. "REAL models don't give up even if they're about to die." It's all about willingness to sacrifice your life for your art. See my old "fashion conspiracy" posting for more info on that.

- Movies featuring winners of Who wants to be a superhero? Those Saturday 9 pm movies also make me annoyed with the SciFi channel. Yeah, so I recorded Mega Snake, which was supposed to "feature" the winner of Who wants to be a superhero, season 1. Oh, my. Fast forward through cheese... fast forward through cheese... fast forward through cheese... I passed through the first quarter of the movie. Then the middle. Then the last... Around 7/8 of the way into the movie I saw Feedback... and his role as a public service announcement guy, telling kids about the dangers of electricity. In all, it lasted about 2 minutes. Maan, I can only imagine what Season 2's superheroes are thinking. "All that work, and THAT'S my main prize???"

- A model life. Reinforcing the stereotype that models aren't the brightest stars in the daytime sky. For example, there was the Brazilian girl who thought she might know photographer's grandmother, who lived in Brazil approx. 50 years before the model was born. "No, I don't know her." Or Michelle, when told she was going to London: "I've never been to London. I guess I'll like it. They do speak English, for most of the part, except for a few of the words." Niice. And the most model-like, Angelika, was let go for mouthing off. Yeah, she deserved it.

- The new Bravo show, Flipping Out. Very funny!! That guy is seriously messed up.

- On The Lot. Will won! Yaay! He was my favorite. Do you think the end part (him walking up to the gates of his new studio) was staged? I have a feeling it was filmed before the actual finale.

- The IT Crowd. They're already halfway through the all-too-short season!! Season 2 has been funny, but not AS funny as Season 1. I just haven't found as many quotes that I want to integrate into my everyday life... like "getting on like a big house on fire" or "you stole it? but that's stealing!!" Hmm... I wonder how the US version will turn out...

- Chuck. I saw the pilot episode on a recent United flight. My response? As Roy's shirt said during IT Crowd Season 2 Episode 3, "Meh." It reminded me a lot of Jake 2.0, except for the electronics superstore part. It just wasn't that funny... But I'll let you make your own call. I think the pilot is officially showing next Monday.

- Without prejudice. Interesting show, but it doesn't live up to its name. A group of five people decide to give $25,000 to one of another group of 5 people for pretty much whatever reason they select. Take the "without" out of the title and you get a lot of what is used in the decision-making process. It's not a bad show to have on as background noise, though...

- Doctor Who. I like this show more and more every season!! I didn't think they'd be able to find a good replacement for Rose, but I was wrong. The most recent two-part episode shown on SciFi, "Human Nature/The Family of Blood" was excellent!! And Baines (the actor also plays Will Scarlett on Robin Hood) made a fantastic psycho bloodthirsty alien. The DVD comes out in a couple months...

OK, I think that's enough TV discussion for one night!!

Stop Wirelifting Dead

Wirelifting. You know, like shoplifting, except wireless Internet style. Do you hate it when your neighbors steal your bandwidth? Yeah, well, so does this guy. Check out his tips and tricks for discouraging neighbors from Intersquatting:

The Upside-Down-Ternet

We should build a statue in this guy's honor! Maybe in the shape of a nutria...?

The drought is over

The IT Crowd, Season 2 has started! The first episode aired on BBC on Friday night. I found it here. It was pretty funny (yaay for Richmond and Moss!), but based on my calculations, the next episode will be funnier. Why, you might ask?

Well, it all started with Season 1. Episode 1, pretty funny. Episode 2, extremely funny. Episode 4, really funny. The rest were funny, but not quite as funny. Following the pattern, that means the 8th episode will be very funny. Using some really tricky math that is way too complicated to explain to mere mortals, I have concluded that this means the 2nd episode of the 2nd season will be very funny.

And yes, I hyperlinked as many things in this blog as I possibly could.

OK Computer

Defcon is now over. As you'd expect, the bottom line is that security is nonexistent, blatant holes are everywhere, and we should move back to paper and pencil communications (or maybe even stone tablets). The usual.

The conference was great. Here are some of the highlights of Defcon 15:

- 11 hours of classes with no breaks--yaay! Those of you who don't know me probably think, "surely she's being sarcastic." I'm not, for once. I like technology, I like classes and lectures, and I don't like breaks. I'm not just a workaholic, I'm an infoholic. If I'd taken a break, I would have missed something! I got tons of notes, too.

- The badge, as I mentioned in an earlier blog. Though sometime yesterday mine started freezing up. I noticed that the same thing was happening to other people too... I guess they followed the Microsoft model when they developed it. "Reboot required." (despite the glitch, the badge is still awesome)

- The whole issue with the NBC Dateline reporter. Yeah, I know, I talked about that already, too. It seemed to be the unintentional theme of Defcon 15.

- The poor guy in the "Hacking Social Lives: Myspace.com" (Rick Deacon's "assistant") who accidentally typed both his username and password in the login box... for a couple thousand people to see. Time to change the password for that account! And for all the other accounts that use the same password... :)

- Speaking of revealing passwords, I found the Wall of Sheep very entertaining. That's where they sniff the network for people using insecure logins for various things. They post the username and password (redacted, of course) for all to see. Hmm... searching "Wall of Sheep" on flickr led to this picture. What I actually meant was this.

- The wedding at the end of the award ceremony, for the new game, "Marry the Fed." IMHO, they should raise the bar next year by adding an extra rule: require that the two people who get married at the end of the conference must demonstrate that they were not dating at the start of Defcon. Hmm, I sense reality show material here...

- Priceless quotes (accurate? close enough). Sergey Bratus - "I developed a converter to convert Klingon to English so I could read the text of Hamlet like it was in its original Klingon." Jason Scott - "Wikipedia: It's like you built a really nice car, and then let 12-year-olds drive it into a wall repeatedly 24 hours a day."

- The TCP/IP Drinking Game was amusing. I actually knew some of the answers that the intoxicated experts didn't get (so maybe I had a sobriety advantage)...

- Entertaining shirts, various nerd slogans. "Legolas is my house elf." "Bic Pen Tester." (the latter was actually at Black Hat, not Defcon)

- The Black and White Ball. Great for people watching!

- Last, but not least, really good information. My favorites were "Aliens Cloned My Sheep," "CiscoGate," "Social Attacks on Anonymity Networks" (partly because I think Nick Matthewson has a great voice), "The Inherent Insecurity of Widgets and Gadgets" (though the speakers kept cracking jokes that the audience wasn't reacting to, like "If you're a werewolf, like I am, you probably are interested in adding a widget to tell you when the moon is full." No audience reaction.), and "Storing and Serving Malicious Content from Well Known Web Servers." I'm too tired to post recaps right now. Maybe later...

And I'll end this blog by posting a video to enlighten you on the grand beginnings of the Defcon enterprise:

Blondes are not to be trusted

The big news from Defcon 15 is that an NBC Dateline reporter snuck into the conference, pretending to be "just another attendee." Apparently she was planning this big expose, trying to find some 13 year old and make him confess to breaking into the Pentagon computer with his PSP (as the Dark Tangent described it). Nice. Understandably, people were not pleased. So the Defcon organizers established a new game: Spot the Reporter!

Early in the day they showed pictures of this reporter. Eventually they outed her, and she fled from the conference. This article contains a video of what went down. Note that you can see my rental car when there are 26 seconds left in the video.

Honestly, though, I was absolutely ecstatic about this entire event from the start. First thing in the morning, they flashed this picture on the screen of a thin, pretty blonde woman and said, "Don't trust her." As a brunette woman, I was very pleased with the effect. It was as if the organizers decreed, "OK, you thousands of attractive male nerds out there... be suspicious of any pretty blonde woman you see. Blonde women can't be trusted. Go for brunettes instead." Thank you, Defcon organizers, for encouraging a healthy fear of blondes.

Now if only that could just spread a bit wider...

My Defcon 15 Badge

This thing is awesome. The display starts out saying "I <3 DEFCON 15," but you can program the lights to display a <= 16 character scrolling message. Hmm. I want to figure out how to make animated characters.

Let's see... what else is on this thing?

At the bottom, on the back, it says "0100011101001111001000000101011001001111010010010100001101000101" ("GO VOICE" in ASCII).

The coordinates 42.34202 -71.069441 are at the top of the badge. According to Google, that's on Waltham Street, in Boston, MA. The closest address I can find is 44 Waltham Street, which appears to be the address of "Boston Pest"...?

Hmmm... gotta think thru this...

Update (8/4/2007):

After Kingpin's "Making of the Defcon Badge" session yesterday morning, people asked about the geocoordinates and "GO VOICE" in binary. He didn't explain the geocoordinates (said it was a part of hacker history that we should all know), but he did explain "GO VOICE." It's a tribute to the good ol' days of the Internet--after talking to someone on IRC or in your trusty BBS, you'd say "go voice" instead of "call me." Too bad; I was hoping it was something awesome like secret voice activation (visions of Denholm at the end of Yesterday's Jam run thru my mind).

No luck yet with the "hacker historical reference." I've googled names, technologies, locations... nothing. Let me know if any of you out there figure it out.

Update (8/5/2007, really, really early in the morning):

Aww, maaan, it was so obvious! I even thought of it earlier, but apparently didn't google the right things. 42.34202 -71.069441 are the geocoordinates for the old location of "l0pht heavy industries" (which later became @stake, which was even later sucked into Symantec). Kingpin, the badge designer, was in l0pht. They were located at 46 Waltham Street, Boston. I was so close!! Sorry for the delay in getting the info out. I'll do better next time, I promise.

I will add that Google Maps thinks 44 Waltham Street is at that location, not 46 Waltham Street. Bad software. Bad!! No treats for you.

Allez Fuzzing!

Sadly, Black Hat 2007 is now over. My first Black Hat. I learned lots. It inspired me to become even more of a nerd than I currently am. I <3 U, technology. Here's the short version ('cuz I wanna go play with my defcon badge. more on that later):

Black Hat low points:
- The annoying "Hackistan" guy. Seriously. Obnoxious.
- Too much red meat. Three out of four lunches this week were beef. What, did the organizers think all those nerds needed to beef up a bit? Sheesh.

Black Hat high points:
- Iron Chef: Black Hat. It was by far my favorite session. It was the static exploitation tool guys versus the runtime guys. The static guys found way more vulnerabilities, but weren't able to get an exploit tool running in the allotted 45 minutes, so the runtime guys won. Awesome. I hope they bring Iron Chef back next year!
- No-Tech Hacking with Johnny Long.
- Web 2.0 is fundamentally flawed. Amazing that most fancy new sites (gmail, hotmail, and whatever else uses Ajax and authenticates up front then pushes you into an insecure session) are vulnerable--just sniff the URLs visited, pull out one with a sessionid, paste it into your browser, and you're in their account! Doesn't matter if they change their password--you're in anyway! Gmail users--turn on SSL. For other sites... well, let's just hope that talk inspired people to secure their authentication systems!
- Satellite navigation injection attacks. I'd read about this on The Register several months ago, but it was entertaining to see their demos. I love the fact that you can broadcast a message like "bullfight in progress" and have it display in the middle of a freeway or something. Oh, I mean, what a terrible vulnerability. Shocking.

Enough for now. I'll probably think of more later.

sudo this, sudo that.

Last week I bought a new computer. It's a fantastic laptop. OK, it's a laptop, but it's not fantastic. It was the cheapest one I could find. It doesn't actually have the minimum requirements to run Vista, but it came with Vista pre-installed. So the first thing I did was wipe the hard drive and install Linux (Ubuntu, since it has a pretty solid user base).

I'm now remembering why I stopped using Linux a few years ago. I like the open source movement and all, but I have to admit that I really like the fact that most hardware is automatically supported in Windows. And most software is easier to install on Windows. Under Linux, it's sudo everything. It took two days and a whole bunch of Googling, trial and error (mostly error), and vi under text mode, just to get the OS to recognize the cheap video drivers (sort of) and display at something other than 800 x 600. I probably should have written down which site had the instructions that finally worked. And if you want to run Java in Firefox on Ubuntu, I strongly recommend totally ignoring Sun's installation instructions and going directly to the Ubuntu user forums. Oh, and some network TV stations' online video options are only available to Windows or Mac users. Grr, so I still can't watch the "last" two episodes of Drive!

The trials of Linux. But at least this laptop runs faster than my other computer...

A string of pearls. Or a string in Perl?

Last week I went to Chicago for a class on Perl (that's Practical Extraction and Report Language). Interestingly, it turned out to be the most useful class I've taken in the past 5 or so years. I only wish I'd learned Perl sooner--I can think of all too many occasions when it would have come in very handy.

I found Perl to be a surprisingly intuitive scripting language. No need to mess with variable types or pre-defined parameter passing. I now know it's a language for people like me. As the instructor kept saying, "We are lazy. We're Perl programmers." Shortcuts everywhere! What started out as bunches of lines of code could always be reduced to something like:

while(<>) {
print;
}

That's a perfectly legitimate and complete script, fyi. $_ rocks. Plus, Perl has great concepts like chomping, slurping, slices, and "anonymous arrays." On some level it made me worry that I'll have to develop an appreciation for carbonated beverages (yuck) and junk food (okay, so I already have that appreciation) to understand the language at a deeper level.


Can't wait to put this dangerous knowledge to good use... :)

Things around town

Apparently the Kennedy Center is attempting to attract a different sort of subscriber: Young nerds. Fascinating. Even more fascinating that I really want to attend both of these events. See here:

- Event #1: The Tiny Ninja Theater performs Shakespeare, on the Millenium Stage. Today and tomorrow it's Macbeth, and Wednesday and Thursday it's Romeo and Juliet. Looks like I'm going tomorrow. What is Tiny Ninja Theater? Oh, just check the hyperlink. You can't expect me to waste my time retyping it all!

- Event #2: National Symphony Orchestra: Video Games Live. That's right -- they're performing theme songs from famous video games!! I really have to go to this. Why is it so hard to find someone who wants to go with me?? Oh, yeah... high nerd factor.

BTW, a note to those people who call themselves my friends and family. Why didn't anyone tell me there was a pirate reality tv show?? SOMEONE must have come across it. Thanks a lot. Good thing my DVR and I happened upon it. Imagine the sorrow if I had missed the entire season. That reminds me... I still haven't seen Pirates of the Caribbean III. My sad life...

Best. Headline. Ever.

Here it is:

Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo

Whoever came up with that headline deserves some sort of prize. Do they award prizes for amazing headlines?

For Nerds' Eyes Only

Sorry, non-nerds out there. You might not be able to comprehend the vast amount of humor in this posting. Maybe next time I'll say something about TV shows or something more widely understood by mainstream America. Maybe.

But today it's tech humor. Yaay!

Part 1: A Joke.

Years ago, when Apple first came out with their text-to-speech applications, two computer guys decided to use it to settle a score: the pronunciation of the name of a popular Unix text editor. The application is called vi. One guy said, "It's pronounced 'vye,' and rhymes with 'sky' or 'bye.'" The other guy disagreed, saying, "you just say Vee Eye -- it's just the names of the letters, it's not a word."

So into the talking computer application 'vi' went. And it said...

"SIX."

(get it? vi = roman numeral 6. oh, never mind.)

Part 2: Chaos Theory.

This picture demonstrates how not to set up your network. Yikes.

Part 3: Toys.

Specifically, USB toys. (fine, and some funny USB storage devices)

- You've heard of thumb drives, right? But you probably didn't think there was a real THUMB drive, did you?
- I don't know what to say about this digital storage device.
- This is arguably old technology (4 years -- that's ancient in computer terms), but it's still clever. It's a USB-powered rice noodle strainer.
- Everyone needs one of these. It's a USB-powered hamster wheel.
- If you're a workaholic (like me), you shovel your lunch down at your desk. Dropping too many crumbs into your keyboard? Clearly you need a USB-enabled duck-shaped vacuum cleaner. Why don't I have one of these?
-Have you declared war on your cubicle neighbors? It's your civic duty. Surprise them with a USB cannon, then beat them down with a USB-powered rocket launcher.

Who comes up with this stuff??

Reasonably useless information

Every now and then various family members pass on relatively interesting pieces of information. Here are some fine examples:

From my brother:
Can't decide where to eat lunch? Spin the Wheel of Lunch. You can even run such queries as (your zip code) and "Thai," and it'll limit your options to Thai restaurants in the area. If you want details, read the explanation.

From my mother:
Go to google maps. Click on "get directions." Ask for directions from New York to Paris. Scroll down to Direction #23 or so.

From my sister (The Conqueror):
A new TV show! It's called Robin Hood, and it's on BBC America. It's about Robin Hood (did you not guess that already?). I discover many good shows on BBC America. Examples: Look Around You. My Hero. Shakespeare Retold. And I'm sure there are others.

A is for Average, F is for Fantastic

Today's posting is all about Easter Eggs. This weekend my sister and I decorated eggs with two very young cousins. Let's see if you can tell from the following picture which eggs were decorated and/or cracked by our cousins and which were decorated by us.



My aunt came up with this very effective trick for adding designs: dye + glue gun + more dye. Nice.

Not into food art? Well, there is another other kind of easter egg -- hidden stuff in computer programs! Unfortunately, it seems this is a dying (no, not dyeing) art--too many companies fear risks added by undocumented code. But back when I taught MS Office classes to pay my way through college, I found that the easter egg discussions (for instance, I pointed out an old version of Excel's Spy Hunter and the MS Access Magic 8 Ball, among others) were the only times when students paid attention.

Ah, the days when you could ctrl-shift-f into Netscape's fishcam... or go to about:mozilla in Firefox for a funny message. Oh, wait, I think those still work (assuming you're using the right browsers).

Looking for others? The eeggs.com archive might be worth a visit.

UPDATE: For some bizarre reason, this has turned out to be my most popular blog entry of all time. Not this quality posting or this controversial topic, but this teensy little entry on Easter Eggs. Huh. You just can't predict these sorts of things.

Anyway, I thought I'd reward the adoring public by giving even MORE information on the creative egg decorating technique displayed in the not so hot picture that probably brought you to this page. I don't know if my aunt made this up, or if she got the idea from an egg decorating book/magazine article/voices in her head... whatever the source, this is a fun and easy technique. (caution--this involves the use of a glue gun, which may not be safe or appropriate for young kids). Steps:

- Take a hard boiled egg, then dye it the color of of your choice. Or skip the pre-dye phase and move directly to the next step...
- Using a glue gun, decorate the egg. If you use one of those mini glue guns you can get a fairly high degree of detail in your design. Wavy lines, squiggly lines, little teensy circles... so many options! But be careful not to burn yourself!
- After the glue dries (which shouldn't take long), put the egg into a second color of dye for a few minutes.
- When you're satisfied with the updated color of the egg, remove it from the dye. Dry it off, then peel off the dried glue. Voila! A beautiful and unique egg design!

Enjoy! :)

Ailihphilia or aibohphobia?

A week with three official holidays! Now, that's something to celebrate. Pi Day, then the Ides of March, and now St. Patrick's Day. I hope you're all wearing something green. I'm celebrating by spending my time in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the homeland of my mom's side of the family (since 1951, at least). Due to the family connection, I'm one of a small number of people who can spell Albuquerque correctly without thinking about it. Clearly, that means my life thus far has been an incredible success. I was supposed to go back to DC for the weekend, but the latest in a long line of ice storms made that not so. Fine by me--the weather here in NM is great!

Anyway, back to this week's holidays. Apparently many schools decided to celebrate Tri-Holiday Season by scheduling spring break this week. What could make the week more exciting? That's an easy question. The answer: more holidays! Let's fill the whole week with 'em--seven solid days of celebration. I've taken the liberty of making up four additional holidays. Feel free to pretend you collaborated. Or, if you don't like mine, make up some of your own!

Septholiday Schedule:

3/11 - Cure Cover Song Day. 311. Lovesong. Do I have to explain it? Sorry, I just don't feel like it.

3/12 - Quarter Day! Spend the day polishing your entire quarter collection. Or you can spend the day reducing fractions! So many options.

3/13 - Yadiloh Holiday. Celebrate palindromes! If you're an elihphile (as I am), you'll enjoy this one. Celebrate at exactly 3:13 on 3/13. You can do all sorts of fun things, like round up your bill at the restaurant so that (with tip) the number is reversible. After all, $18.81 looks much better than $18.53 or something. Or you can cite famous palindromes, like "A man, a plan, a canal, Panama." Or buy a goldfish and name it Hannah or Bob or something. Gotta love symmetry. I sure do.

3/14 - This one already is a widely celebrated holiday. Hooray for Pi Day!

3/15 - Beware the Ides of March! Stab a friend in the back today. Or let someone betray you. Maybe you deserve it...

3/16 - I'm going to make this "Cynical About Technology Day." I just don't believe that bits and bytes can be sent around the world in the blink of an eye. I certainly can't walk that fast. So how on earth can I e-mail someone on the other side of the planet and have the message arrive in their inbox in a matter of seconds? It must be some sort of Truman Show type setup. If you happen to believe in this technological nonsense, then you'll note that today in binary is 10000. For those curious cynics out there, spend the day reading the RFCs that became the foundation of the modern Internet. Reading is fun!

3/17 - St. Patrick's Day! A good day to close out the holiday week. I'm opting not to wear green, 'cuz I have green eyes. That counts, right?

do U wnt 2 D8

It's amazing how the US is so far behind the curve with some of the hottest modern technology. For instance, there's the marvel of text messaging. Sure, we use it now. But people in other countries started doing things like divorcing their wives and breaking up via text messaging long before us. It's such a hot trend, even the Prime Minister of Finland recently dumped his girlfriend via SMS. Classy. At least it's giving her an opportunity to write a book.

Now Finland is trying to out-tech itself. A Finnish author named Hannu Luntiala wrote a novel in text message. Unfortunately, it's in the Finnish dialect of SMS. But the publisher is considering translating it to other languages. If we're lucky they'll translate it into Ubykh or something. After all, they translated Harry Potter into Welsh... surely they'd choose a nice, obscure language (um... besides Finnish) for the text message book.

Text messaging books. Goodness. What next? An animated movie illustrated entirely in ASCII art? Oh, wait, someone did that a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away... But surely no one has thought to do an ASCII music video...?

UPDATE: Apparently my posting was timely. Text message lingo is spreading like a disease... Or is this part of the natural evolution of language? After all, you don't often hear 17th century English. Things change.