I’ve got a funeral to attend today, and don’t know when regular content will resume.
This song seems like a pretty good epitaph for my stepfather.
“He never threw a fight when the fight was right.” Indeed. There’s a lot of things I could say about the man, but when I needed him, he was there with me.
After the jump, a possible spoiler for “The Wire”.
Continuing our in lieu of content theme, I couldn’t find a good video of Norman Greenbaum. So here’s one from Dr. and the Medics, who actually do a pretty good version of the song.
I’m willing to suggest that this is quite underrated as a Christian hymn. And both versions have that great wide guitar sound.
Since the status of actual content is still kind of up in the air, I thought I’d fill in the gaps by linking to some songs that seem…fitting. Or, at least, songs that are on my playlist for times like this.
My friend Pat Cadigan first introduced me to this song, and that’s one of many things I owe her a great debt for.
I wanted to link to this story about changes at Austin’s KGSR over the past year, and the payoff for those changes (more listeners). The story is somewhat buried on the Statesman‘s web site. I only discovered it because I was reading the Life and Arts section over breakfast this morning.
This story also represents something else that I’ve brought up before; the entitled attitude of so many people in Austin, who think that nothing (public or private) should ever change. Personally, I’m in favor of anything that decreases the chance I’ll hear Bob Schneider or Kasey Chambers on the radio.
The Liberace Museum is closing.
I’ve actually toured that museum twice, and had a great deal of fun both times. I find it just a bit surprising that they employed 30 people, but with all the clothes, the cars, the musical instruments, and what not, as well as staffing the museum, I guess I shouldn’t be that shocked.
The mention that they also hired a professional curator from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (who lasted a year) is also kind of interesting. I know Mike the Musicologist had some thoughts on curation and the Liberace Museum after our first visit, but I’ll let him post those if he wishes.
(Thanks to Bill Crider for the tip on this.)
Edited to add: Here are links to two stories from the Las Vegas Sun: link 1 and link 2. I do not believe the Sun is associated with the Las Vegas Review-Journal or Righthaven, but if I’m wrong about that, please let me know.
I’m home and safe, but still running a little behind. I hope to have the DEFCON 18 Day 3 notes up tonight, along with an after-action report on Las Vegas.
While I was on the road, there were reports that Angela Spaccia, the assistant city manager of Bell and the interim city manager of Maywood, had resigned from the Maywood position. Apparently, that’s not exactly the case; the Maywood City Council didn’t accept Spaccia’s resignation at their meeting Monday night. However, they did accept the resignation of Maywood City Attorney Edward Lee. Curiously enough, Lee is also the city attorney of Bell, and states he needs to resign his Maywood position to focus on the issues in Bell.
Obit watch: Mitch Miller.
Morrie Yohai, inventor of Cheez Doodles.
I’m running a little behind, between running around with Andrew and Mike the Musicologist, and some technical issues (DEFCON 18 has a secure wireless network, but it hasn’t been stable), but I’ll post updates when I can. I’ll also add links to the presentations as they go live, or as I find them. If you have questions, I’m willing to try to answer them, but I’d suggest you email the presenter first. If you are a presenter who wants to respond to my comments, I welcome that.
“Build a Lie Detector/Beat a Lie Detector”: This was the first presentation I attended; it was a pretty awful one. The presenters started 15 minutes late and opened with a crappy rap performance (differing tastes in music, fine, but when you’re running 15 minutes behind schedule, the rap should be the first thing to go). Once they actually got going, they spent too much time on a general history of justice systems and of the polygraph. When they did finally get to the technical aspects of their presentation, it amounted to “Oh, yeah, we built this lie detector based on this paper these other guys posted” (with, to be fair, some minor modifications). I walked out of this presentation before the end, which is something I rarely do at DEFCON.
“Build your own UAV 2.0 – Wireless Mayhem from the Heavens!“: On the other hand, Renderman and his partner did an excellent job with this one And not just because they played “Thunderstruck” before the presentation started (playing music is okay, even if I don’t like your choice of music (and I like “Thunderstruck”), as long as you start on time), or because they started on time, or because they actually had video of their UAV launching rockets. (Edited to add 8/10/2010: added link to DEFCON 18 slides and video on Gremlin’s website.)
Key takeaways for me from this one:
“Exploiting Digital Cameras”: Another solid presentation. Basically, Isacson and Ortega did some clever banging on the firmware of the Canon Powershot series of cameras, found that these cameras have an embedded interpreter, documented that interpreter, and developed some simple exploits using it. The exploits are somewhat limited; you can’t launch malware on an attached computer, for example, but you can do things like turn on the microphone, display arbitrary images on the camera, and modify EXIF data.
“DCFluX in: Moon-bouncer”: A decent presentation on the theory and practice of radio communication using moon-bouncing, satellites, and other methods. I’m going to gloss over the details of his talk and refer you to the presentation when it goes up, as there was a great deal of technical information in it related to historical and amateur radio usage; I’m not sure the majority of my readers are that interested in ham radio, and those who are would be better served getting their information from the source.
“Black Ops Of Fundamental Defense: Web Edition“: So here’s a high-level summary of Kaminsky’s talk. Now that the DNS root certificates are digitally signed, we have the ability to use DNSSEC and the Domain Keys Infrastructure (DKI) to do all kinds of cool stuff, including end-to-end email authentication (so you can be sure that the email you got from Bank of America is actually from Bank of America, and not from some random Nigerian), and to do these things in a scalable way.
Kaminsky’s new company, Recursion Ventures, is building (and plans to release shortly) a set of tools that will allow for the easy deployment of DNSSEC. Kaminsky also gave a brief overview of how DNSSEC works, and touched on a few interesting points related to his research. (For example, not only is it possible to run DNS over HTTP, but Kamisky’s figures show performance over HTTP is actually better than normal DNS.)
(Edited to add 2: The link above goes to a page on Recursion Ventures web site where you can view the slides from Kamisky’s version of this talk at Black Hat 2010. I did not see the Black Hat version of this talk; I do not believe the DEFCON 18 version was significantly different. It may have been shorter, and there is some Black Hat specific material in those slides. Also, I’m aware the actual title (“Black Ops of Fundamental Defense: Introducing the Domain Key Infrastructure”) differs from the title in the DEFCON 18 schedule; I chose to stick with the DEFCON title to make cross-referencing easier.)
Edited to add: I’m sorry if anyone is disappointed, but I did not go to the “Weaponizing Lady GaGa, Psychosonic Attacks” panel.
This FARK thread and this post by Glen reminded me of another guilty pleasure of mine: Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart”.
More specifically, this version:
and this version:
All the cool kids are doing it, so I thought I’d throw my chapeau into the washing machine. Hence, a list of my guilty pleasures:
“Cops”, on the other hand…well, I can’t explain the strange attraction of that show to me. I’d like to think it isn’t a “there but for the grace of God go I” sort of thing; no matter how low my social circumstances go, I don’t think you’ll ever catch me wearing a wife-beater and drinking a Bud Light after thumping some on my woman. It may be that there’s just a dark part of my soul that enjoys seeing stupid people in trouble.
As for “Convoy”, let’s just say that I used to have a 45-RPM record of that song that I literally wore the grooves smooth on. Yes, it is on my iPod.
“Magnum Force” I’ll also defend as an answer to the critics who claimed Harry was a vigilante, and the people who said “So what? Maybe we need vigilantes these days.” I see “Magnum Force” as a movie that’s explicitly about the rule of law, and the need for same.
“Sudden Impact”…well, I really can’t defend that as anything but fun. “Smith…and Wesson…and me.” “Go ahead, make my day.” The dogshit speech. (Another shameful confession: I also have Clint Eastwood and T.G. Sheppard’s duet, “Make My Day”, on the iPod.)
I won’t defend “The Enforcer”, and I’ve heard so many bad things about “The Dead Pool” that I haven’t watched it yet.
Had it not been for a timely tip from Lawrence, we would have let tonight’s historic anniversary pass unnoticed and unloved.
And we can’t have that, can we?
Ladies and Germans, I give you the 31st anniversary of the greatest event in sports history. I refer, of course, to nothing other than Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park.
I would link to the video on FARK’s “Videos” tab, but it doesn’t seem to want to load. So I’ll leave you with an odd bit of trivia from Wikipedia:
For White Sox outfielder Rusty Torres, Disco Demolition Night was actually the third time in his career he had personally seen a forfeit-inducing riot. He had played for the New York Yankees at the last Senators game in Washington in 1971 and the Cleveland Indians at the infamous Ten Cent Beer Night in Cleveland in 1974.
I was also not aware that the last Senators game ended in a riot and a forfeit. You learn something new every day,
Department of “The Jokes, They Just Write Themselves”:
Today’s NYT has a followup article on the Ronell Wilson case, going into more detail on the legal issues. Basically, the death penalty sentence was overturned because prosecutors hammered that Wilson had not pled guilty, had refused to testify, but was claiming remorse. Several people in the article are quoted as wondering how the prosecution could have made “such a simple procedural mistake”. But I’m actually a little bit sympathetic to the prosecution: before the prosecution made their statements, Wilson was allowed to read a “statement of remorse” to the jury, without being cross-examined by the prosecution.
Loser update: Astros still hanging on to fifth place. Baltimore at 24-54, for a .308 (God’s caliber) winning percentage, projected to win 49.896 games over the 162 game season. Put another way, roughly 112 losses. Remember, though: we’re closing out the first half of the season. Things can change for the better (worse?) during the second half.