Two Cleopatras
Three Dorthy’s from the Wizard of Oz
Many women with skimy tops showing off their cleveage.
Japanese school girls (dozens)
Gandolf from Lord of the Rings
Three Harry Potters
An elve
Lots of kids dressed as horses, alligators, and SpiderMan
And, on my way home through Dupont Circle, the aptly attired Bert and Ernie walking hand in hand. Guess the rumors are true….]]>
scanner mailing list erupted with alerts that the sky was colored at this very moment. SCAN-DC is a DC scanner mailing list that tracks things like shootings, fires, Presidential motorcades, Combat Air Patrol activities and a bunch of other stuff on the airwaves. They posted the Aurora news because a lot of the radios they were using got a bit fuzzy. But anyway, the sky was an amazing shade of red the other night, and we had some greenish/white hues even farther to the south. It was simply amazing over the Bay, and I swear a dozen small airplanes were doing laps trying to get a better view. Not likely to see something like that again anytime soon.]]>
San Francisco 7-11 worker sells the winning ticket to the $98 million lottery. He gets $250,000 for selling the ticket and is pretty excited. FREE SLURPEES for everyone. Then his wife asks the real question. Who bought the ticket? “”Umm, well, I don’t know.”” They look through their own tickets and viola, THEY BOUGHT IT. Not only did they get the $250k, but they also got the $98 million. Not a bad day.]]>
Military.com has a piece that should be read not only by military-interested persons, but computer security professionals as well.
Turns out that 28% of the troops we deployed to Liberia (and remember, we only deployed a few hundred) came down with Malaria. The same guys who shoot up machine guns were stricken by a few mosquitos.
Here are the statistics from military.com
Out of 290 people who went ashore in Liberia, even briefly, from ships waiting off the Atlantic coast, 80 contracted malaria — an “”attack rate”” of 28 percent. Of the 157 troops who spent at least one night ashore, 69 became infected — an attack rate of 44 percent.
In all, 44 were ill enough with falciparum malaria — the most serious of the three types of the disease — to be evacuated to Europe or the United States. No one died, although several developed cerebral malaria — an infection of the brain — that required them to be on mechanical ventilators in intensive-care units.
But the interesting reason is “”why did they come down with malaria?”” They didn’t follow the proper preventive measures. Thousands of Marines sitting on a ship preparing for battle didn’t have time to take their medicine (that once weekly thing that actually gives you some pretty funky dreams). They didn’t treat their uniforms with the military equivilant of Deep Woods Off.
This bodes ill for computer security professionals who expect end users to patch up their own holes and fix their systems by themselves. There are so many people who still look for the “”any”” key on the keyboard and complain that the “”cup holder”” / CD drive is broken that we really can’t see “”patches”” as the way to maintain the systems in the future. Microsoft has issued so many patches this year they’ve even given up and gone to a monthly system (just because users are so busy they can’t keep up).
I don’t know what the answer is. I used to say I used a mac because I was “”creative”” but now I’m saying more and more that I use a Mac because it is “”secure.”” Of course, no system is perfect, but the mosquitos of Africa should prove a lesson to anyone wanting to buy Microsoft for their office.]]>
CCTV. Not much luck. Nearly every overseas Chinese person was on the same link, and we would get about 10 seconds out of every minute. Kind of annoying. Still, we saw some good footage of the rocket going up. It was also interesting to follow this over the last few days with mama reading Chinese sites. She told me the name of the guy 72 hours before the Western press, and confirmed the launched date and time about 48 hours prior. You have to wonder if the American reporters they have in China actually read the local papers, or even speak Chinese?]]>