/dev/random

MacMegasite just got hit with 6 more comment spams of the same type I’ve been seeing recently. This time the spam plugin caught them before they got posted. I banned yet another IP address block owned by China Telecom, 61.140.0.0 - 61.147.255.255. If this keeps up, I’ll have all of China Telecom banned.

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via Sun-Sentinel: A majority of Americans say President Bush’s next choice for an opening on the Supreme Court should be willing to uphold the landmark court decision protecting abortion rights, an Associated Press poll found.
The poll found that 59 percent say Bush should choose a nominee who would uphold the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision [...]

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Here are some miscellaneous photos of Cody & Midnight that were on my other computer.

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I just got the following phishing email at my gmail account:

Dear eBay Customer,
This email is a reminder that your eBay account information suspended. To avoid any interruption to your service including the ability to log onto eBay account, please update your credit or debit card information by clicking here and submitting our form.
If you do [...]

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Corn plant, originally uploaded by mike3k.

The corn plant in my garden is blooming, like all of them around here. The flowers don’t look like much, but they’re very fragrant. The air is full of their [...]

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I was back at the site yesterday upgrading more Dell laptops. This time we had it down to an assembly line and got it done a lot faster. Unfortunately 24 of the laptops never showed up and the truck couldn’t be located. Those laptops have been reported lost or stolen.

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On Nov. 22, 2001, Jerry Colaitis died of a blood-borne infection. It all started with a dinner at Benihana. Jerry ducked to avoid a piece of shrimp tossed at him by the tableside chef, which the chain is famous for. Doing so resulted in a neck injury, for which he underwent surgery 6 months later. [...]

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There’s nothing more annoying than using someone else’s heavily customized PC. Windows XP takes long enough to boot, but when you have to wait for a half dozen applications like MSN, AIM, etc. load, it gets even slower. It usually takes well over a minute to boot and you don’t get any visual feedback to [...]

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Since I switched MacMegasite’s RSS feed to FeedBurner, I find that my bandwidth usage has been dramatically reduced. One person has complained about the ads in the feed, though. I’m considering some kind of add-free feed for a paid subscription (which would also remove ads from the main page), but I haven’t figured out how [...]

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I just got hit with the same comment spam at both macmegasite and worldbeatplanet. Two spams were posted at each site, with a subject something like ’sdsf’ and the content consisting entirely of Chinese characters. All of the ones I saw today came from the IP address 218.17.119.154. Last week I saw exactly the same [...]

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Great story at MetaFilter: Sand Springs, Oklahoma overcomes their own homophobia to defend a gay teenager against attacks by Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church.

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Christmas Lights, originally uploaded by mike3k.

I got up most of my christmas lights already. The building next to me did theirs a few days ago & the clubhouse and pool area is already decorated.

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Since more than half of the visitors to MacMegasite read the RSS feed, I’ve decided to take advantage of it by putting ads in the feed, using FeedBurner. Since FeedBurner doesn’t modify the original feed but creates a new modified feed, I needed a way to get ads in my existing feed. One way to [...]

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Clouds at sunset, originally uploaded by mike3k.

When I went out this afternoon I saw some very striking clouds, so I got my camera and took a few pictures.

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For the second time in several weeks, Miami-Dade police officers have used a 50,000-volt taser on a child. Last week, police officers used a taser on a 6-year-old boy threatening them with a piece of broken glass, and now it’s been disclosed that a taser was used on an unarmed 12-year-old girl who was skipping [...]

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I’ve just reached the ultimate in geekiness. I’m now running a G4 optimized copy of Firefox I built myself on my own PowerBook. It feels a lot faster than the official build.

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I’ve been reading about Weather Report bassist Jaco Pastorius recently. I discovered that he went to the high school just up the street from me. The club where he was murdered is now Corner Pocket Billiards in Wilton Manors, a spot I pass frequently when I eat at one of the restaurants in that shopping [...]

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I did some work in my garden today, so I used it as an excuse to try some outdoor shots with my new Canon A75. Click any picture for a full size image.
A close-up of the orchid (at 3x optical zoom)

My newly planted and mulched garden

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A must read essay by John Perry Barlow describes a lot of what I’m feeling now. A few days later, it still hurts. Knowing that most of the country hates me and doesn’t believe I deserve the same rights they do just plain sucks.
Here’s a reason to look forward to 2008. During this term, some [...]

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Here’s a great idea from Juan Cole, via Daily Kos:
If Democrats were sly, there is a way out. The Baptist southern presidential candidate should start a campaign to get the goddamn Federal government out of the marriage business. It has to be framed that way. Marriage should be a faith-based institution and we should turn [...]

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