Know did you that Master Yoda a weblog writes?

Which OS are You?

Russia’s most (in)famous spammer, Vardan Kushnir, 35, was dead in his apartment in downtown Moscow on Monday, July 25. Someone repeatedly smashed his head with a heavy object, authorities say, and then ransacked his entire apartment.

(Let this be a lesson to you: "Spam kills!" or, as my amusing husband put it, "For God's sake, don't spam!")

And another article that might be of interest:

Certain anti-spam parties have made threats in the past against some of the world's more notorious spammers.
[...]
Russian Internet service providers frequently closed down his sites when users complained about the spamming practices.
[...]
Among those complaints came death threats; it is speculated that while many were from angered users, some may have come from the sort of loosely-organized anti-spam gangs described in the 2004 book Spam Kings.

"The stigma that was once attached to computer geeks and role-playing nerds is diminishing incredibly fast," said "digital gangster" Bryce Case Jr., aka ytcracker. "It has almost become trendy to have skills on a computer. Rather than guns and 'hos, I speak about DDOS attacks and camgirls."
 
The self-proclaimed "#1 greatest computer science gangsta rapper ever" is MC Plus+, a geeksta leading light whose moniker comes from the C++ programming language.
 
The Purdue University, Indiana, Ph.D. candidate and "CS pimp," whose album Algorhythms was recorded with pirated software, calls himself "the Tupac of the computer science world."
 
MC Plus+ rattles off lines like: "I'm encrypting shit like every single day; sending it across a network in a safe way; protecting messages to make my pay; if you hack me you're guilty under DMCA."

I got my Palm PDA because I kept forgetting appointments, and because I wanted to read ebooks (well, I work for a publisher, after all, and I get free copies of the books for which I do the covers). I had no idea how incredibly useful one of these things is, though.

I just love this thing. I can keep track of appointments, yeah, but it's also got a very cool built in "to do" list with items that disappear when you tick them off the list (I use it for grocery lists, mostly), I've installed some fun software (Neko is handy for entertaining children), it's got alarms and timers and other cool features, I can take notes with it, it's just incredibly useful.

How on earth did I get by without one?

Well, my toe feels pretty okay today. I'm still on pain relievers because it's not entirely okay yet, but it's not bad at all. The worst pain is in the knuckle, where he had to dig below the skin to get to the root of the nail. The place on the side where he removed the tumor and cut out the nail isn't really painful at all.

So, all is well in the land of Bonni's toenails at the moment. I'm sure you were sitting on the edge of your seat waiting to hear news, of course. (Note for the Sarcastically Challenged, although none of my regular readers are that, or they wouldn't be regular readers: Yes, I'm joking. I think Miranda and I are the only ones who are really interested in my toe at this point, and she's only interested because she's three and a busybody.)

I shamelessly lifted this from someone else's journal thingy (only the questions/concept; the anwers are mine, obviously). It's an online quiz from somewhere or other but I wanted to do my own formatting, so...

Choose a band/or artist and answer only in song TITLES by that band: The Eagles

Are you female or male: Witchy Woman

Describe yourself: Desperado

How do some people feel about you: Victim of Love

How do you feel about yourself: I Wish You Peace

Describe your ex girlfriend/boyfriend: Certain Kind of Fool

Describe your current girlfriend/boyfriend: Love Will Keep Us Alive

Describe where you want to be: In the City

Describe what you want to be: Learn to be Still

Describe how you live: Visions

Describe how you love: Best of my Love

Share a few words of wisdom: Take it to the Limit

James Doohan, who faked a Scottish burr to create one of television's most endearing characters, Chief Engineer Montgomery (Scotty) Scott of the U.S.S. Enterprise, died today at the age of 85.

The FBI has collected at least 3,500 pages of internal documents in the last several years on a handful of civil rights and anti-war protest groups in what the groups charge is an attempt to stifle political opposition to the Bush administration.
 
The FBI has in its files 1,173 pages of internal documents on the American Civil Liberties Union, the leading critic of the Bush administration's anti-terror policies, and 2,383 pages on Greenpeace, an environmental group that has led acts of civil disobedience in protest over the administration's policies, the Justice Department disclosed in a court filing earlier this month in federal court in Washington.

The anesthetic wore off about 11:30 last night. I'd gone to have a rest and then I went to sleep around 9:30, and I woke about 11:30 when Andrew came to bed. I could feel that the anesthetic was starting to go, so I just quickly took a couple of the strong pain relievers I have (I was clever enough to take a bottle of water with me when I went to bed) and went back to sleep.

When I woke up at 7:30 or so, the toe was pretty uncomfortable, feels like a burning sensation, but it's not horrible. It's not actually worse than the infection was, and for that I didn't have the strong pain relievers, just over-the-counter stuff. I had some more pain relievers and have found that so long as there's no pressure on the toe from standing or walking, it's actually not painful at all. I am walking with a limp, and I went out today in my pink, wool-lined sheepskin slippers (and yes, they definitely look like slippers), but with the noticible limp I figured if anyone noticed my shoes, they'd just see the limp and figure out I had something wrong with my foot (or not; I actually don't care all that much).

Now it's 10:30 and I feel pretty okay. I was lightheaded and very tired last night, but today it's not too bad at all. Tomorrow I go back to have the bandage taken off and so the doctor can look over the wound and make sure it's healing and such, and after that, it's just a matter of waiting for it to heal.

Okay, I'm not all that comfortably numb, but my toe is numb and it's not painful at the moment. I just came from the doctor, where I had surgery to cut out the edge of my ingrown toenail. Doctor said it was the worst he's seen in a very long time. Eeek. He showed me the nail and how far embedded it was in my flesh, and it's no wonder it hurt like crazy and the tumor thingy wouldn't go away. Youch.

I expect that later, when the local anesthetic wears off (that, by the way, was painful going in), I'll be bitching about it, but for now I'm just a bit lightheaded and kinda tired and hoping that it heals nicely and without any complications (which I pretty much expect it to do, but you never know).

I'm going to go lie down now and read an ebook.

Okay, so I've discovered ebooks. I mean, I knew about them before this, obviously, but now that I've got a proper PDA, I can actually read them on it (I hate sitting at the computer to read, well, to read fiction, anyway). I've read one from the ebook publisher with whom I have the contract to do cover art, and I'm now reading one from another online publisher of whom I'm aware.

It's pretty good, actually. The Palm is small and I can carry it anywhere, it's not hard to read on it, and I can save backups of the files on my hard drive so I don't have to carry them all around on my PDA (which, of course, has more limited memory).

I can see that this could become addictive....

I suppose I could take a picture of my latest toy and post it here, but really, it's just a Palm. It's not color or anything, pretty basic. It's a Palm m500, for those who pay attention to these things.

I spent some hours playing with it last night, installing software, putting in information, customizing things, etc. And then I took it to bed with me. What? Don't look at me like that. I took it to bed with me to read an ebook. Sheesh.

Right now, it's sitting in its cradle on top of my external DVD writer, on my desk, watching me. I think it knows I'm writing about it...

I bought myself a new PDA last week and it arrived today. I got it because my memory is getting worse and I need to keep track of stuff (mostly appointments, which I have a terrible habit of missing), and also so that I can read ebooks in bed, since I'm on contract with an ebook publisher and I get copies of the books if I want them.

Ooooooooh. New toy. Shiiiiinnny.....

And naturally, I've already discovered that there's all sorts of free software for Palm devices...

I've never felt much about Tom Cruise one way or the other. He's an okay actor, and I've liked some of the films he's been in, but mostly, I don't care, particularly.

I started to think he was a little shit when he divorced Nicole Kidman and claimed in the court paperwork that they'd split up right before their tenth anniversary, so he could get out of paying her a really big settlement under California's divorce laws. Her evidence that they had not split up at that time (i.e., she was pregnant and far enough along to show that the child was conceived before that anniversary, and even though she had a miscarriage, she had DNA evidence that it was his child) was compelling enough to make him admit that, okay, well, maybe they were still together... And, of course, any many who would treat his wife that way isn't really a man I think too much of anyway.

So that was what made me first start to think that he was not a particularly nice person. Now, after his various outbursts about mental illness and such, I'm pretty much convinced that Tom Cruise is nuts. If Katie Holmes had any sense at all, she'd be running for the hills, but I'm guessing she hasn't got much sense...

What the fuck do you think you're doing?
 
This is London. We've dealt with your sort before. You don't try and pull this on us.
 
Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you're trying to do, it's not going to work.

Let it begin now. Let it start with a wry askance glance and evolve into full-fledged annoyance and then move into raging hell-bent OK that's quite enough now please stop before we slap you silly.
 
Note to Tom Cruise: You are maxing out. Wearing out the welcome. Becoming less the tolerable and moderately talented and mildly likable megastar and more like an itchy boil on the deranged ferret of popular culture, requiring lancing.
 
The signs are all in place. The crazy ranting, the jumping on couches, the crazed grins, the enormous piles of money, the incessant photos of you sucking the face off your new and bewildered and child-like fiancee, the weird diatribes about psychiatry and mental health, the relatively common knowledge that you are super-seriously involved at the highest levels with one of the creepier money-hungry pseudo-religions in the nation.
 
Also: the assigning of a "handler" from said cult to tag along with your new bewildered young fiancee everywhere she goes to "keep her on the path" and make sure she doesn't, I don't know what. Talk about the nightmares? Break down in a heap and confess that it's all a staged setup? Reveal your true lizard identity?
 
Yes, Tom Cruise is getting weirder, more annoying than ever.

Just for the heck of it, I scanned in some of my traditional media pictures and put them in my online art gallery. I have two there now, one of which had to be scanned in pieces and reconstructed (interesting task, that). I have more that I might like to scan or photograph, but they're all too big for my scanner to handle, and too big to scan in pieces, as well. Hrmmm.

At least, I find this Flash game thingy addictive. Note that you can actually "grab" the figure with the mouse and move her around. I like to try to find a nice comfy place for her to rest, or work her through very small spaces between the bubbles, but I heard of someone playing "crash dummy", as well...