I learned how to tie the Pratt Knot last night - also sometimes referred to as the shelby knot. The reason for the descretion is apparently Jerry Pratt, its American inventor, used the knot for thirty years before Don Shelby publicised it on local television. It came about in the New York Times and Daily Telegraph in 1989.

In any case, I was recently informed that the Windsor knot is slightly dated for the “modern man” and is also quite a big knot. With the Pratt, you not only get a slightly smaller knot (good for those medium-bodied ties), but also a nice little dimple in your tie just below the knot. It’s bugging me out a little bit, though, because you end up with the small end facing the wrong way. I realize that you can’t see it and you could even twist it if you wanted to, but the fact that the knot is originally designed to flaunt symmetry is difficult for my logical mind to process and stop thinking about. We’ll see how it goes.

I drove by this accident about a half-hour after it happened yesterday.

For those not wanting to click the link, a motorcyclist collided with a mini-van and the rider (not wearing a helmet) did not make it. This happened right across from the entrance to my hotel, so I got a good, close look at the scene on my way to the client. Not the way I wanted to start my morning, nevermind the poor guy on the ground.

This is almost like the other morning when I was driving to South Bend, IN. I saw a dirt cloud rise up on the median about a quarter mile ahead of me. Realizing there might be an accident in progress, I slowed down. By the time I reached the area, traffic was still moving, but I looked across the median to see a car on the other side of the highway, facing oncoming traffic, with an 18-wheeler bearing down on it! Luckily, the truck driver must have slowed down initially as well, because he was able to stop, but not by much more than a couple feet in front of your car. Not a sight I’d like to see after pulling a few (?) 360’s across the highway median.

Hopefully, today will be uneventful!

I’ll be at defcon this weekend in Vegas. It’s usually a good time - last year I took a helicopter over the strip (which banked over the Luxor), hit up a foam party, and generally enjoyed myself. I plan to do much of the same again this year.

Some good things to remember when you get in an argument or heated discussion. These are either things to avoid, or things to watch out for in order to avoid the ongoing abuse in our conversations.

via Jon Galloway - a 4th grade teacher is teaching some important lessons.

Here are the rules: Each week, you get a salary of funny money (I think it can vary depending on grades and behavior, but the details aren’t important). There are cheap, flashy toys you can buy with your funny money.

Catch number one: You must pay rent on your desk. The rent turns out to be a significant amount of the funny money.

Catch number two: You can save up and buy your desk. This takes several weeks of saving. After you’ve bought your desk, you no longer pay rent, so you’ve got more money each week.

Catch number three (my favorite): After you’ve bought your desk, you can buy another student’s desk. They must pay you rent (unless they save up and buy the desk).

What’s funny is that the same thing happens every year - the boys blow all their money on the flashy toys, while the girls all save up and buy their desks. Then the girls buy the boys’ desks. Then the girls buy all the best goodies. The boys get outraged at having to pay rent to a girl, and that the girls have all the money.

I was having some problems today setting up a Cisco PIX 6.3.3 for remote access using the Cisco VPN client. I am using the Windows Server 2003 Internet Authentication Service to handle user authentication, for which Cisco has excellent documentation on setting up.

I hit a couple snags.

First, I wasn’t able to use the Client-Friendly-Name parameter when defining the remote access policy. For some reason, it was not picking up *Pix. When I used Client-IP-Address, that worked fine.

Second, I would be able to auth, but the connection would hang at the “Securing communication channel” stage. Unfortunately I had forgotten to add the dynamic crypto map set into a static crypto map set. Oops. The following command fixed things up:

1

crypto map mymap 10 ipsec-isakmp dynamic dynmap

Now I just need to get all my ACL’s set up properly so I can go where I want to.

I just installed Debian (again) and had to look around again to find out how to stop using 100dpi fonts, which are too big for my liking. I finally found a thread on Google Groups that mentioned the files to change.

This default can be modified by editing the following conffiles:

    xdm     /etc/X11/xdm/Xservers           (see xdm(1))
    xfs     /etc/X11/fs/config              (see xfs(1))
    xinit   /etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc        (see xinit(1))</blockquote>

Ah, much better.

I learned a couple things about buying a tent last night.

1. Don’t buy cheap, especially if you’re doing more than camping in your backyard. You will notice the quality difference once your tent flies away in the wind.
2. Don’t buy a tent with a “fiberglass frame”. Despite the cost savings, why somebody would make a tent with fiberglass poles is beyond me. Hey…here’s a good idea, let’s put fiberglass into the one component of the tent that requires excessive handling during setup. </sarcasm>

I learned a couple other things too, but I can’t remember them now.

whoa…liquorice altoids:

Maybe at a store near you…

Yup - It’s going to be a long week. I just checked into my hotel at around 12:30am local time and had two priorities - Internet and beverage, in that order. I walked into my room and found the Internet access to be a dialup connection - lovely. Fortunately (sarcasm), there was a list of fine dialup providers next to the phone such as AOL, MSN, and even Juno.

Giving up on that, I went in search of beverage. I saw the red glow of some vending machines across the lobby and headed out for some exorbinantly expensive refreshment. Coming up to the “Ice and Beverage” area on my floor, I discovered mine was the one floor they put a snack machine on instead of a soda machine. No problem, I’ll just run up to 7. Oh, that machine doesn’t accept dollars. shrug 8 it is, I guess. What? Sold out? Well 9’s not that far, but…there isn’t any machine at all on 9! Hustle on back down to 5 only to put in my dollar and hear the machine grind for a good 15 seconds before my soda gets dispersed.

Well that wasn’t so tough. Now I’m back in my room on 52.0 Kbps dialup. Ironically enough, this is the week that I’m getting bumped up to 3.0 Mbps at home. I will note that there is “high-speed” wireless, but you pay in 24 hour chunks by credit card. They can’t make it easy and charge it back to your room, of course. I have to drop my CC# into one more database each day for the next four days.

I think I’ll just go to sleep.

Oh…the modem jack also wasn’t actually hooked up to the wall…it was just there to look pretty. :-p