LinuxWorld was lame. It was this really uncomfortable non-consentual sex act between geeks and suits. Each group seemed to have serious resentment of the other. On top of that, the exhibitors were simply boring. I did have a very nice and interesting conversation with the guys manning the ReactOS booth, definitely piqued my interest, but other than that, it was pretty much a waste of time. Actually, beyond that, it was plain boring.
I did run into , however, which was an unexpected surprise… I haven’t seen him for like 6 years or something… I met a bunch of his coworkers and we caught up. While I wouldn’t say it’s that strange to meet a CSHer at LinuxWorld, it was still a bit of a surprise.
I have an extra ticket to see Fantomas, The Locust, and Trevor Dunn’s Trio Convulsant at the Roxy in Boston on 4/13… is going, and if anyone of you pals want to go drop a line.
In addition, if you know of a really, really, really good Unix admin (who can stand up in Windows too) who wants to work out of Chelmsford, MA (on call 24/7) you should put them in touch with me. US Citizenship required and you must be able to obtain a Security Clearance (you don’t need one now, although that’d be a bonus).
Much noise was made when the Shmoo group pointed out an obvious flaw (obvious, as in the designers knew all along) in the Internationalized Domain Name system. The long and short of it is that there are characters in other alphabets that look just like letters in our latin alphabet, and you can use these to visually spoof domain names to users, and pretend for instance to be paypal.com. There were a number of suggestions to disable IDN support in Firefox, but almost all of them were temporary fixes (due to bugs in Mozilla). This site has instructions to permanently prevent this from happening using the wonderful Adblock extension for Firefox.
I noticed a crack forming in my windshield the other day… It has gotten progressively worse, and fortunately the insurance company is sending someone out today to replace it. MA mandates zero-deductible glass coverage for comprehensive insurance, so I don’t have to pay a dime (or, at least, I don’t have to pay a dime more than I already pay for car insurance.. :P). It is nice just sitting at work while someone comes to the parking lot to replace your windshield… When I got a new windshield for Maude I had to take her to the glass place.. This is much nicer. :)
Well, despite all of my negative expectations regarding the subject, we not only got our yearly bonuses today, but they were much higher than I was expecting. The past two quarterly meetings the execs were setting up everyone for disappointment, but I guess some business worked out earlier than planned and we ended up hitting our goals and even maxing out a few categories. So I got a 5.7% bonus, but that’s of my pro-rated salary for last year (since I started in March). That still works out to quite a pretty penny, which I will use to line up the last stake in my credit card debt, which will subsequently fall to zero next month. I called today to cancel my old Parda FCU accounts and credit card (from when I worked at Warner-Lambert). When I got that credit card I needed to have an account with them, so I opened a savings account with 5 dollars in 1996. In 8-9 years I earned a whopping 69 cents in interest. :)
