One month ago: “We have a clear vision of how to win the war on terror and bring peace to the world,” Mr Bush said.

Now: Bush suggests
war on terrorism cannot be won

Granted, these two statements/headlines/quotes are somewhat misleading, but it's a damned interesting contrast, I think, and well worth reading both articles.

I did a rather cute new image, inspired by those lovely WWII pinups (such as painted on the nose of planes). Naturally, it's at Committed to bandwidth on Tue, 31 Aug 04
in Webdev, Digital, & Geeky Stuff

We've had a series of security breeches on our server for months. Regular readers will recall that several months ago the server was totally offline for a while... That was due to an intruder who screwed up the system and then then was a network outage that made it impossible to repair the damage.

We've had other, minor, weirdnesses on the system, too, little nasty scripts that were set to run, odd things upsetting various parts of the system. Some (but nowhere near all) the problems were from an older version of the Gallery script (have evidence for that), but we kept getting these break-ins.

Well, we finally found the security hole, and it was a script that one of our hostees was running. The script was wildly insecure and allowed someone to run malicious code on our server via the web (nice, huh?). The hostee, I'm very sure, had no idea the script had this flaw, but for the time being the domain has been shut down until we can find a fix (and we've disabled a particular feature of php that made it possible to do this).

Now, though, the point of this ramble... Every single documented break-in we've had has been from Brazil. Not always the same IP address, not even always the same ISP. We've firewalled off (i.e. blocked) an entire ISP (the biggest one in Brazil, from what we can tell) and eventually an entire Class C from Brazil.

What IS it with Brazilians that they keep targeting my server? I suspect that our IP address was on some Brazlian "script kiddy" site as a likely target, but it still irritates me. If it continues (attempted exploits) we may end up blocking the entire country or something...

Have you ever noticed that almost all of the time, when someone says, "Well, I'm sorry that you feel that way," what they pretty much mean is, "I don't really care what you feel"?

Just a little observation.

Yes, of course I remember that it's your birthday. I hope you have a happy one, and that you have a wonderful year.

No longer confined to school grounds or daytime hours, "cyberbullies" are pursuing their quarries into their own bedrooms. Tools like e-mail messages and Web logs enable the harassment to be both less obvious to adults and more publicly humiliating, as gossip, put-downs and embarrassing pictures are circulated among a wide audience of peers with a few clicks.
 
The technology, which allows its users to inflict pain without being forced to see its effect, also seems to incite a deeper level of meanness. Psychologists say the distance between bully and victim on the Internet is leading to an unprecedented - and often unintentional - degree of brutality, especially when combined with a typical adolescent's lack of impulse control and underdeveloped empathy skills.
 
"We're always talking about protecting kids on the Internet from adults and bad people," said Parry Aftab, executive director of WiredSafety.org, a nonprofit group that has been fielding a growing number of calls from parents and school administrators worried about bullying. "We forget that we sometimes need to protect kids from kids."
 
For many teenagers, online harassment has become a part of everyday life.

"We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect rule Iraq,'' Bush wrote. ``The coalition would have instantly collapsed. ... Going in and thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations mandate would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish.
 
"Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different - and perhaps barren - outcome.''

glorify Bonni

Normally, I think spammers are full of crap, but in this case, I think they have a point...

Just wanted to share this, as I got a real giggle from it.

Andrew's writing some casual documentation for something at work. He wrote:

"While this should be taken with a grain of salt, there are some things we can do about it."

To his amusement and dismay, the grammar checker in the program then suggested he change it to: we can do about it some things.

Well, I say that this is something up with which we should not put.

Hey! Great minds think alike, eh? Hank has a journal/blog/thingy called So Anyway, too!

Find out how secure your web browser is. You may be surprised...

I've been neglecting my weblog. I'm bad, I admit it. I've been really busy with visually-oriented things and I only have just so much brain power. Trying to think of witty or even vaguely interesting things to say can be difficult when I'm spending so much of my mental energy elsewhere.

It is a good thing, though, because that sort of creativity is quite relaxing, I find. I use my eyes and my hands, and my mind can be free to wander somewhat. Almost meditative, actually. I think of it as Pixel Therapy.

Oh, and I should also mention that I've actually reached a goal I set for myself. I've got a product brokered at DAZ3D, producers of premium 3D content. I did the project with a friend, which was really kinda fun (and it was mostly spur of the moment). Anyway, now I'm a DAZ Published Artist, which has lots of happy little perqs and such (like a nice discount in the store there). It's also nice to achieve goals, you know?

So, that's where I've been and what I've been doing. I'm still here and kicking around, honest.

Insensitive computer programmers with little knowledge of geography have cost the giant Microsoft company hundreds of millions of dollars in lost business and led hapless company employees to be arrested by offended governments.

Also from the same article, "The annual National Geographic Survey had thrown up the sad fact that only 23 out of 56 young Americans knew the whereabouts of the Pacific Ocean." One has to wonder about this. Do you suppose they could find their arse with both hands if required to do so? I mean, I get not knowing where, say, Myanmar is (or that it used to be Burma), but the PACIFIC OCEAN?!

I found the article in the Independent News (UK) really interesting. Exerpt:

As obscenity goes, a flash of female breast is hardly worth bothering with. Magazines from Vogue to Heat show them all the time. Barely veiled bosoms are on view on young women in cities the world over.

But this is the story of one exposed nipple that shook the world. It has been impossible to ponder the issue of public morality in America these past few months without wondering whether we aren't living in weird parallel universes. In the first, 2004 has been the year in which the United States was caught torturing prisoners in Iraq, was accused of lying about weapons of mass destruction, and was deemed to be violating the US constitution and international law by holding so-called "enemy combatants" indefinitely without trial.

In the second universe, none of these matters one jot: not as moral issues, anyway. In this universe - the province of cable television, talk radio and the strangely hermetic corridors of power in Washington - there has been only one noteworthy moral outrage in 2004, one thing to offend the consciences of decent citizens and make them despair of the nation's moral fibre.

I know what you dream of
I want to dream with you
Can you let me in your heart?
I need someone to share with
let me help you
dream

Don't be fooled by others!
We fool you better than anyone!

Go read the funniest blog I've read in a while. I was literally laughing out loud.

See? There really are cool perqs (yes, it's "perq" as it's short for "perquisite", look it up!) to running a webring for webloggers...

This will boggle your mind, and you'll keep trying it and trying it to see if you can outsmart your foot, but you won't be able to...

While sitting at your desk, lift your right foot off the floor and make clockwise circles.

Now, while doing this, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand.

Your foot will change direction.

I told you so.

I finally got the time and inclination to sit down and do a nice digital illustration just for my own entertainment. You can read about it and see it for yourself at elizabyte.com, but I can tell you it's inspired by one of the sexiest toon women ever, Jessica Rabbit (I once had a pet rabbit called Jessica, actually; she wasn't particularly sexy, unless you were a boy rabbit, I suppose).

I've been just wildly distracted and busy lately. I've been going through that horrible, horrible process of "auditioning" software. YUCK! That's where you search all over the world wide web for a pre-written software/script package that will suit your needs or which you can hack up to suit your needs, then install them, play with them, try to configure them, and see if they'll do what you need.

As it happens, I've installed umpteen different shopping cart systems over last couple of weeks, and I'm so bloody sick of mucking around with MySQL and php I could just spit. I'm not a programmer, and I don't know a lot of php (although learning it has been on my "to do" list for ages now), and while I'm more or less competent in a Unix shell, I can't always work out how to do stuff if something goes wrong with an installation or something. Very annoying, very frustrating, very time-wasting. I hate it.

The good news is that I did finally find a shopping cart that fits all my needs, YAY! And it's Open Source and therefore free, double YAY! The thing is, I now have to figure out how to customize the thing, and while it doesn't seem too terribly difficult, it's a bit of a pain in the neck because it doesn't use standard HTML type templates exactly. It's modular. I don't know what all the modules are... I'm seriously considering just keeping the existing design, which is perfectly functional anyway, and just changing the colors with the CSS and maybe customizing the footer and header a little bit so it all fits with the main site.

And if that made no sense to you, just think how I feel. I mean, it makes sense to me in an abstract way, but I actually have to pull it all apart and fiddle with it until it actually makes sense, and not only that, but I need to muck around with it until it all actually WORKS...

Which, of course, is why I haven't done it yet, and why I was instead enjoying myself with a picture of a Jessica Rabbit-like toon babe...

I've been told, at various times, that I'm evil, I shouldn't be able to sleep at night, that the only thing of interest about me was my sexual organs, that I was worthless, useless, and defective, and various other insults and curses.

Well, now I find out that "Most of the women who claim to be "Web Designers" have been some dumb little bint who graduated art school and drew bad littlepictures for some Programmer to code," and that I am "a mean spirited, self indulgent, bad mannered bitch."

Hmph. My manners aren't that bad. And while I can be pretty sarcastic, I'm not actually mean spirited.

The weird thing is, I'm not even sure why the person who has taken on a crusade against me in at least one public forum has chosen to do that. I mean, I don't even know the guy. Seriously, I don't know him. He claims to be "a programmer with thirty years' experience" and made all sorts of claims that I argued that programmers should all be fired and that they were all sub-human or something (I say "or something" because I really don't quite get what he's on about).

See, there's this one site I frequent that has a long, long history of being unreceptive to input from the membership (it is a membership/community site, and one with an accompanying online store that supports the site and earns a profit for the company that owns it) has a problem with a small percentage of people having trouble loading the menu. The management's responses to this have been, to say the least, unsatisfactory and showed a lack of understanding of front end management on a user-based website. I have been my usual opinionated self on the topic of their unresponsiveness and, in my opinion, unprofessionalism.

For reasons I genuinely fail to understand, this guy was pissed off by it. I'm guessing he's just got Major Issues and I happened to trigger him on one or more counts, but some of the stuff he accused me of was just bloody laughable.

I like programmers. Been married to one for some years now, and many of my friends are programmers, as well... Yeah, I object to community-based sites that tell part of the community who are having problems with something that could be easily fixed to basically go to hell and shut up, but how that's supposed to apply to all programmers everywhere, I really can't figure out...

Anyway, I just wanted to write it all down for posterity's sake. Oh, and I do know I'm a bitch. Being a woman who has opinions and dares to voice them automatically puts me in that category...

The new ballistic missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads can be moved around to hit targets as far as the US

Inside the Monkeysphere is the best essay/rant/editorial on human nature that I've read in a long time, maybe that I've ever read. Go read it for yourself, but be warned, it's got some bad language in it (mostly just for emphasis), so if you're likely to be offended by that sort of stuff, errr... read anyway (it's worth it), just be prepared to flinch a few times or make a "tsk" sound and shake your head or whatever it is you're inclined to do in those situations, okay?

The Statue of Liberty reopened on Tuesday for the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, amid new threats of attack, but some visitors complained they were not allowed to climb to the crown of America's best-known symbol.

U.S. troops who abused Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison did it "just for fun," a military investigator testified on Tuesday in a hearing for a female soldier photographed holding a naked Iraqi on a leash.

First Ron Regan, Jr speaks at the Democratic National Convention, and now it seems that “Mrs. Reagan does not support President Bush’s re-election and neither to most members of the President’s family,” says a spokesman for the former First Lady.

I have a cold. A painful cold. My head is incredibly painful, and when I woke up I was hacking and spitting and trying to clear my throat and.... let's just say that the effect of having a cold in your sinuses is not very pretty. Ugh.

My head feels like it's going to just crack open or something...