Geek Drivel

GoddessJ and I were with some friends at a mall yesterday, and we decided to stop by the Apple store. I wanted to see the iPod Touch in action; I was considering replacing my aging Palm TX with one, and at all the other stores that carry them around here, they’re never charged and running.

I was very favorably impressed. The touch screen on it is ridiculously good, and the software seems very well thought out. But I also discovered a fatal flaw: there’s no external speaker on it at all, so it can’t duplicate the most often-used function of my Palm, which is sounding an alarm to notify me of upcoming appointments.

It also tops out at 32GB (at least 10GB too small for my entire music collection), still doesn’t have cut-and-paste capability, and Apple is keeping a stranglehold on the applications the company allows to run on it. So I’m sorry to say that I won’t be buying one. Maybe the next generation will remedy these lacks. If so, I’ll buy it in a heartbeat.

UPDATE: As described in the comments, it seems that the Touch does have a working external speaker, at least for notifications of events and such. Rumor has it that there’s a hardware refresh on the way, but I’ll probably be picking one up today anyway. One of the less expensive models, so I won’t feel so bad about replacing it with an updated version in a year or two.

GoddessJ and I attended a friend’s wedding over the weekend, for our friends B and L. It was… interesting.

It was held in a very small town. There was only one chain hotel anywhere near, and it was booked solid before the wedding date was even set because there was some other kind of gathering going on in the town at the same time. The wedding guests were forced into the smaller privately-owned hotels. Ours was named the “Save Inn.”

The seventies-era all-metal sign in front advertised “color TVs, telephones, air conditioning, and electric heat.” I can’t vouch for the heat, but it definitely had air conditioning, which rattled almost loudly enough to drown out the all-night-long drunken party that a group of twenty-somethings held in the parking lot directly outside, the first night. (I had to ask the front desk to ask them to turn down the pounding bass music from a car stereo around midnight.) Internet access, high-speed or otherwise, was not an option.

The rooms were decorated in early cinderblock, and even included two unadvertised bonuses: an ancient (and empty) mini-fridge that stank of stale beer, and a pair of houseflies to give it the perfect touch of home. On the plus side, the room was clean, the flies were the only creatures we had to share it with, and the bathtub was deep enough to have a really relaxing soak, so I don’t really have much to complain about. It was very good to get home yesterday though.

The wedding went well, and the reception was tolerable even to me. I managed to get the first dance with the bride (after groom and the bride’s father had their traditional dances with her, that is). Not that I had much competition, the two of us constituted half of the people on the dance floor for that number. The community center they’d rented for the reception included a sign inside the door that had an… interesting… use of quotation marks:

“NO” Alcoholic Beverages Beyond This Point

GoddessJ suggested that it was deliberate, that the first word was in quotation marks as a kind of written form of a wink and a nudge, because everyone was ignoring the sign anyway.

I don’t know how widespread the practice is, but at most weddings I’ve attended around here, there’s a tradition that when the guests tap silverware against their glasses, the couple has to interrupt what they’re doing and kiss. At our wedding, GoddessJ and I had trouble eating our dinner because of the constant demands for this. L and B had an interesting solution though… they brought out a hula-hoop, and said that anyone who wanted them to kiss would have to get up and hula first. A few people (including me) did so, but most wouldn’t embarrass themselves, so they got to eat their dinners in relative peace.

GoddessJ was a bridesmaid (brides-matron?), so we heard a lot of interesting stories about the guests. The annoying childhood friend of the bride, who had to be carefully placed at a table where she didn’t know anyone so she wouldn’t make an ass of herself (she managed to anyway)… the group that refused to sit with so many people that the couple just put them at a table by themselves (which they then complained about)… the one cousin who had said she would show up alone, but then decided to bring her new boyfriend and couldn’t be bothered to ask the couple about it first… the cousin’s histrionic mother, who called up the groom’s mother at 4AM that night demanding that she come and pick them up from their hotel, for reasons still unknown to us… I’m sure there are other stories that will come out as well, once we hear from the happy couple again.

All in all, I can think of worse ways to spend a weekend.

Earlier this week, I posted a rant about three near-identical spam messages I’d received from spock.com. It turns out that they (apparently) weren’t spam at all, but that the site was contacting me on behalf of someone (as yet unknown) who had my addresses listed as part of their contacts. The messages were supposed to have that person’s name in the from-field, instead of mine.

There’s still something that smells a little fishy about this — very few of my contacts have that particular set of addresses, for instance — but I’m willing to accept that explanation until more evidence appears.

When I published the last entry, WordPress informed me that it was my 499th post, so I decided to add this celebratory 500th one.

(Pardon the excessive alliteration in the title, I got a little carried away. )

Last night, I got a message from my instant-messaging program, indicating that it had been logged out of one of my IM accounts because I’d “logged in from another location.” I’m pretty sure that it was an error in the program (rather than someone else actually logging into my account), but it got me thinking, and I realized that my e-mail and IM passwords were pretty weak — I’d created most of them long before I came up with a way to remember difficult passwords, or started using a program to create and store them, and hadn’t thought about them since. In other words, most of those accounts used the same easily-memorable but very weak password.

(This isn’t as much of a problem as it sounds though. All of my important e-mail is GPG-encrypted. But it still isn’t a good idea.)

So I spent a couple hours this morning changing the passwords for all of my IM and e-mail accounts. The Skype one was already secure (because I’d opened it after I improved my password system), and one e-mail account was as well (because the company that runs it insists that I create a new password every few months). I was able to find and change my Yahoo and GMail/Google Talk passwords on the ‘net with minimal effort, and my primary e-mail account is on a server that I control, so that was simple enough as well. But then I ran into trouble.

After digging through the online help system, I discovered that ICQ only allows password changes through their client program, which (of course) is Windows-only. Heaving a put-upon sigh, I fired up my VMware Windows XP system and downloaded and installed it. After that, it was pretty easy, but I shouldn’t have had to do that, in my opinion.

I also discovered that ICQ limits you to eight characters at most in a password. That’s probably secure (my bank uses the same limit, and they can cut off Internet access to the account if someone starts pounding it with a dictionary attack to guess the password), but it’s irritating that I couldn’t use my preferred password length.

Next up: my MSN account. You would expect that you could go to the MSN homepage, log in, and somewhere in all the crap on it find a link to change your password. You’d be wrong, of course… Microsoft could never make things that easy. Nor would they provide any link to a FAQ or help page on how to do it, so after trying and failing to find any information on their site, I did a web search and discovered the way: you have to go to https://accountservices.passport.net/ instead. Of course, it should have been obvious! And they limit password length to sixteen characters, so I couldn’t use my preferred length there either. Grr!

After all that, changing my ISP e-mail password (the last one on my list) was fairly anticlimactic.

Anyway, they’re all changed to secure ones, so if anyone was able to log into my IM account last night, they should be locked out now.

GoddessJ and I went to see the Iron Man movie a couple days ago. Even she loved it, which is saying something, but I thought it was awesome. I’m definitely going to get the DVD as soon as it comes out… I hope it includes an extra about the scene where the red-and-gold armor is being put on him for the first time, showing exactly how much of that was done with CGI. It couldn’t have been all CGI, but there’s no way it could all be done in reality either.

Poloni Ploni Almoni mentioned this page to me. I’m not an MBA, and I’ve never studied their way of thinking, so it was quite eye-opening, and finally explains a lot about cell phone providers that I’ve never understood before.

WTF?!

Yesterday evening, through a bizarre set of circumstances, our front door was left open for about three hours without us realizing it. Our three pampered and indoor cats reacted to this in various ways… Oliver Bert-tholomew Purrington (the youngest and smartest) came upstairs to let us know about it, and when he was unable to make us understand what he was trying to tell us, explored the outdoors until he got cold, then came back in on his own.

The other two apparently stayed in the house, and were visited by at least one of the neighborhood’s several outdoor cats. Predictably, they were traumatized… Winston (”Winnie the Pooh,” an extremely nice cat, but to put it charitably, is as thick as two short planks, as well as being the original fraidy-cat) hid under our bed until we pried him out late last night, and then hid in the basement until we made him come out and eat this morning. His sister Salem, a.k.a. “Fluffzilla,” recovered much more quickly… she was herself before we went to sleep.

All of that is fairly irrelevant to the purpose of this post, which is to point out this Slashdot posting describing recent research that suggests that cat owners are one-third less likely to die from heart attacks. I just wonder whether human ownership by felines does the same for them… for Winston’s sake, I hope so.

Test post, seems to be some trouble on the server.

Update: Apparently this version of WordPress has a problem with the letters CC followed immediately by a colon. Every time I tried to publish the next post (with the letters “FCC” followed by a colon), it told me that the post was “not acceptable.” I had to change my sentence structure to avoid the colon in order to get it published.

That’s probably a security thing, to ensure that e-mail addresses aren’t posted or something, but it sure made for a few interesting minutes while I tried to figure out whether my blog had been hacked.