Posts

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.

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. ...

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.

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. ...

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. ...

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)) Ah, much better.

whoa…liquorice altoids: Maybe at a store near you…

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

Found an interesting little tidbit about IIS Subauthentication. Just a li’l sumthin sumthin to tuck into your bag of tricks for later.