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Having almost a year Away From Keyboard, sort of, Kekepower finally got himself a new server up and running at kekepower.com. Using ddrescue he restored everything from the old server disks, meaning that my ol' "picture storage" is up again @ sigge.kekepower.com/extra.



This includes my 100 JESUS PICTURES! Enjoy.

Edit 20th November 2008
... bump! I guess he didn't specify just how long it was intended to stay up:)

Dr. Pauly will be a guest at the Keep Flopping Aces radio show, which is hosted by noted poker author Lou Krieger, tonight at 9 pm ET (or 6 pm Vegas time). You can call 'em here: 810-496-3428.

A podcast should be available within 48 hours after the show. Good luck, Pauly!

You might have read about my excellent N95, only to hear that it was stolen from me. But my friends still only hear a constant sound of nothing. 'Cause I'm still without a phone! That's right. I must be the most laid back, stressed out little hamster you could ever imagine.

After receiving the legal papers entitling me to a new phone it took another three weeks for me to actually take the papers to the store and get it. I got the exact same model, now referred to as "the original N95", even though I could have had any phone on the planet. Ish. That's because the original has a lens cover which is quite essential to a camera, despite the fact that people buy new and better (!) phones today without them. The power of supply and demand. It's like using the same condom over and over again and still expect it to do the job.. And someone's demanding it.

I took it home, cradled it nicely on its own little pillow and went to sleep. The following morning it was fully charged and still not stolen. I took it to my entrusted laptop and began upgrading the firmware, which always keeps me at the edge of the seat until a bold Firmware Upgrade Complete signs light up, and the phone reboots. It went very well. I moved to the rear of the seat and proceeded to the backups. It also went well. Until I rebooted the thing, and it was bricked. It wasn't stolen, thank god, but it was as useful as a brick.
Bricks are useful when you build a house. Not to dial 911. Or an escort service.

It would boot up to that Nokia handshake, which always comforts me, because even though I don't have any idea who those two men on my screen are, they seem to agree about it. Whatever 'it' is. Could be a drug deal. Or human trafficking. Or a contract kill. Who knows? Maybe he just got a fake rolex to a great price and wants to shake on the deal? I just wait for them to agree so I can type in my PIN code. But they wouldn't allow me this time. There was an error message that the phone was in serious trouble, probably because of the handshake, and would refuse to cooperate until I took it back to the store. Damn.

So two weeks later I took it back to the store and complained about the Nokia restore software that didn't even have a warning about restoring backups from previous versions, but it was all fine and dandy, covered by the warranty and that; but if I took it to the store next door I could get it a lot faster than the x weeks they need at central command.
ITSATRAP! I thought. They want me to pay more. But time's an issue.
So I went along to the next store where I had to sit down and wait in line. For another two weeks. Then I got it back ALL FOR FREE with a British operating system instead of the Norwegian one, which is good because the Norwegian men. is. all. abbr. But now what?

I've been staring at it for weeks. The newly fixed phone has a v30 firmware. My backup is v21. I've been without a phone for 9 proper versions! If this pace keeps up I'm gonna have to train myself some carrier pigeons. Or brick it again.

Random tagline for another brilliant issue of Truckin'. Pauly writes:

Thanks again for wasting your precious time with Truckin'. The November issue features two new writers, Matt Moon and Jonathan Bennetts. We also have two veteran scribes returning in May B. Yesno and Betty After Dark. And yeah, that's a sultry dirty story from Betty! I also added a bit of fiction to the mix for this issue.

Jupiter Four by Pauly
Cal never had a chance. After one season of winter ball in the Dominican Republic, he walked away from baseball. He was miserable down there. His Spanish was bad. He caught a nasty parasite and his girlfriend constantly begged him to come home....

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Conviviality by May B. Yesno
The voice crackles and chatters. The sum and substance of the call is an invite to play with resistors and transistors and bread boards, hot solder and imagination. One of the customers wanted company. His wife was off chasing her particular dreams of sustenance some six hundred miles away across two mountain ranges...

Luna Moth by Betty After Dark
Then you flipped me. On my back. Crawling on top of me. Hovering over me, you pushed my arms above my head. I imagined you had tied me up. You fumbled. We giggled...

The Green Chip by Jonathan Bennetts
In just over twelve months Alex had hit rock bottom and it seemed like he had been there forever. He plummeted headlong into being a hopeless drunk who'd lost everything; his sole reason for living now was to raise five bucks daily for his quart of Orillia Tiger Ruby Red Port wine...

Pizza and the Party by Matt Moon
tried talking and joking with Brittany but she was giving one-or-two-word responses. She was not digging me. She'd rather stare out the backseat window than associate with me. That was very unfortunate. I was really hammered and she had some cute aspects to her. I kept trying to progress the conversation but failed miserably every single time....

Since Pata Pata in 1977, the African singer Miriam Makeba has been known as "Mama Africa" due to her struggle against the Apartheid and for Africans' rights. I had the honor of enjoying her music live when I still lived in the North. She died last night, age 76, after she had had a heart attack on stage. Befitting her life and personality, she died during a performance supporting the fight against the Italian mafia. RIP.

My bruvva just tipped me off about a new rap release from NASA featuring none other than Tom Waits. It definitely adds some serious testosterone to the tune. Click the pic below to stream (note: you won't find Tom Waits in the picture).


Alternatively, click the link to Koew above to download it!
As Pitchforkmedia writes: It's well worth a listen even if just to hear Waits utter the words "ghetto booty."

Congratulations, USAE!
Congratulations, Obama!
Congratulations to the free world!

My brother just posted a "last three CDs I ordered" so why not update my sublet mortgage crisis credit frenzy?

• Michael Brecker - Tales from the Hudson 
• John Coltrane - Live at the Village Vanguard 
• Mercury Rev - All is Dream 
• Mercury Rev - Snowflake Midnight 
• Mercury Rev - Strange Attractor (click for free download) 
• Sun Ra and His Astro Intergalactic Infinity Arkestra - Space is the Place 
• Fat Boy Slim - You've come a long way, baby 
• Fugees - The Score 
• Lou Reed - The Raven 
• Depeche Mode - The Best Of, vol. 1 

Apparently there's some kind of election going on in the USAE, and my vote's for the Hawaiian guy. 'Cause people from Hawaii are hellakewl. And I think this particular Hawaiian has got what it takes to rid the USAE of its crippling lobbyism. Lady C was so frustrated the other day, because our media is filled with this election from morning 'til midnight (when BBC World Service takes over to cover the USAE election) and she is still not allowed to vote. This vote is important for Other Countries as well, you see, whether or not we like it. We don't like it, but there you have it.

And this morning I heard a specifically startling piece of news, when a commentator remarked that: "America's role as a moral authority has been in question for the last few years". For the last few years? How about the last fifty years?! And moral authority? Come on, you're talking about Big Mac country here. Where scientific theories that are widely accepted are still questioned on the basis of text-book religion. Where people store massive guns in their homes because the constitution has not been updated since it was created, and people wonder why crime's so high. Where freedom and peace are registered trademarks of the American way, and not, as was proposed, the outcome of a rational discourse between sovereign states in the League of Nations (UN). Where insight and knowledge are put aside for ignorant decadence. Where the dream of a dream once noble has been substituted with a consumer capitalism tainted with whimsical egocentrism. Where citizens salute a piece of cloth like the Romans saluted their god emperors, the Nazis their swastikas and soviet their Stalin; while a good goddamn is what's left for human worth.

America: you are a toddler! For once, choose the rational alternative.

It has been a long, long while since I last updated this "thread" of useful security-related applications for Windows and Linux, last time was when Torpark was still called Torpark, because I've purposefully withheld information that was sensitive at the time. You don't have to be an 1337 h4x0r to find out where I work, and why it could be a sensible stand given factors of varying nature. But enough shadow talk and secret whispering! There are a few applications that I use daily that I recommend to my peers who care enough about privacy. And whatever I reveal here is not sensitive for my work place. Today I want to tell ya'll about wiping.

Whenever you do something in the electronic world, you leave a trace. And whenever you delete a file, you leave a trace. Most systems don't even delete the file they just mark it as empty space, and it is free for anyone to undelete them completely. I will write on data recovery and forensics later.

But what to do then? Simply stop using computers? No. Even though you live in a cabin in a forest without any electricity, you can be sure that there are insecure systems out there who store information about you. The way to tackle this problem is a simple change of routines. Instead of deleting files and compromising the data whenever the storage device is a) returned for service or b) simply thrown away or c) stolen/accessed/cracked, is to wipe the files.
There are many ways to wipe but my favourite is The Hacker's Choice:

The deletion process is as follows:

1. The overwriting procedure (in the secure mode) does a 38 times overwriting. After each pass, the disk cache is flushed. 
2. truncating the file, so that an attacker don't know which diskblocks belonged to the file. 
3. renaming of the file, so that an attacker can't draw any conclusion from the filename on the contents of the deleted file. 
4. finally deleting the file (unlink). 

THC's Secure_Delete tool does exactly this. Using:

$ srm -v <filename>

or

$ srm -r -v <directory name>

you get a verbose output of the wiping process of the file or directory respectively. The nice thing about Linux is that you can include secure_delete in any bash script or cron job (scheduled task) that you wish.

Wiping, in any system, naturally takes some time. THC writes that in 1 second you can approximately overwrite 1 to 2 MB of data, depending on your harddrive performance. In totally insecure mode, a 100 MB file/free-disk-space takes about 15 seconds, while the totally secure and recommended mode takes approximately 60 minutes. Leaving the wiping to itself is probably the best way to save time, while you boot up your second machine to read the latest sigg3.net adventure.

The two file systems in use in the Windows world at the moment are FAT and NTFS, both of which is supported (somewhat) in Linux as well. FAT is a pretty old format, and data gets fragmented if you sneeze in the general direction of the chassis. Files stored in FAT are really easy to recover too. NTFS is a huge step in the right direction, because it dynamically utilizes the disk making data recovery harder over time, but still lags behind some of the better unix file system formats such as xfs, ext3 and reiserFS. In other words, data wiping is even more important in Windows than in Linux. So what applications can you use? I'll cover one commercial (but free) and one open sourced tool here.

Jetico's BCWipe
A very simple to use tool that integrates nicely into the Windows desktop. You download and install the free trial edition (embedded license) and you'll receive a right-click option for wiping, including: Delete (file or dir) with wiping, Wipe recycle bin and Wipe free space. The latter is brilliant, because by first deleting the file normally and then wiping the free space of that disk, any intruder will not be able to distinguish what has been a file and what has been empty space. By default, however, BCWipe uses the US Department of Defence 7-time wipe setup which is not what your privacy requires!
Instead select the Guthman method (35 wipes) or create your own custom wipe. If you're about to wipe large amounts of data over a few days Windows may give you some trouble. Disable hibernation and standby or else the wiping file can be made inaccessible to BCWipe and the process will halt waiting for user input. BCWipe allows you to choose what to do when the desired operation is completed, such as show log, restart or shut down the computer.

Heidi's Eraser
Heidi, fronted by a gal looking suspiciously like a number 6 cylon agent, has made a wiping tool for windows that is open sourced and released under the GNU General Public License. It was Irongeek who tipped me about it because I didn't like the bcwipe license. Similar to BCWipe it features a nice context-menu option but also has a scheduler feature, which is always nice. In contrast to BCWipe, Eraser uses the Guthman standard by default. I have only tried it once, but my feeling's that they both get the job done (though Heidi has a nicer license).

Making a habit of wiping sensitive data or traces thereof will do you no harm at all. In fact, it may save you from losing face (or your job) one day. All those embarrassing photos of celebrities, for instance, would have been avoided if the camera or cellphone memory had been wiped before it was turned in for repairs. And what about the external USB-cabled hard drives that you use for backups, when you send them in for replacement. Did you wipe'em first? I hope you did, or else you'll have people like me checking out your data. I'll cover forensics at a later time. In the meanwhile, do as your mother told you and remember to wipe.

In what must be a Radiohead follow-up after their success with In Rainbows, the weirdo strange-band music group Mercury Rev has released two new albums one of which is free. That's right!

I happened to pass by the music store at Oslo City shopping mall, and popping in I spent more than a thousand crowners on various items... I have a habit of doing this. It's like a disease. A very costly disease which pays itself back a thousandfold. Anyway, one of the covers on display was Mercury Rev's new album Snowflake Midnight which I immediately grabbed hold on. I've got everything they've done since Deserter's Songs which is on my all-time favourites list. And I even got a 15 NOK discount for a broken cover when I bought it.

At home I opened the sleeve only to find that there was an accompanying album called Strange Attractor which wasn't just online-only it was totally free. I headed over to their website just now, and all you have to do to receive your 11-track copy in 320kbps glory is joining the mailing list (which you can unsubsrcibe from after the download is complete).

• Download Mercury Rev's STRANGE ATTRACTOR 

If you like Mercury Rev or if you haven't even heard of them (mostly referred to as "the band with Goddess on a highway") I strongly urge you to head to the link above and signup for your copy. And if you don't like them, download it anyway, because you're such a tool.

Roughly ten percent of American Presidents have been assassinated, and many more have survived assassination attempts. And one thing people don't say out loud is that the first black president will have survival as his top priority. With the first coloured president on the doorstep of the White House many are concerned about Obama's safety, 'cause there's still quite a few nutjobs who understand the name 'White House' quite literally and are willing to spend the rest of their lives in jail to think about how much they sucked in life. It's the American Dream, and people almost expect it. But no one expected this:



Danny the Tranny and his no-good net friend planned to execute 102 people (88+14) before turning their rifles at presidential candidate Obama. According to the FBI, who held his MySpace page* under surveillance, the two neo-nazi-nerds apparently met online in a dating room for closet homosexuals/nazis. They have even released some of the IRC chat logs. *(Is it just me or is MySpace hosting a lot of weirdos these days?)

D tha C: hh lol
Turd Reich: hh! ftw
D tha C: redy for the Job 2morrowe?
Turd Reich: you betcha, can't wait to
D tha C: good. i bought white suits for the obama finale
Turd Reich: i'vegot some turkey sandwhiches from my mum
D tha C: great.... i luv u
Turd Reich: luvu2. hh!
D tha C: here's my pic btw, so you don't think ima fake
Turd Reich: so sexy
D tha C: ftw

Well, I guess where they're going they can finally live out their dreams.

It's been a while since I did something else than work. Anything else. I barely have time to go to the bathroom, so often I just forget about it and walk around cross-legged for another six hours before I realize my skin's turning yellow. And this weekend was no different. There's a conference on Child labor in Oslo (it's called Damn Children Stealing Our Jobs!) and I was supposed to magically provide for internet access. I was also supposed to track down hardware not yet on the legal market. So when I was invited out to have a few drinks at a friend's parents' house, I said: "Sure why not but I gotta be back real early, cuz I've got work tomorrow." This is the SMS log between me and Lady C who was working (really working) through the session. It began quietly at home, Saturday evening after work.

19:45
I'll be joining Kornelius and the Mysterious mr. S @ Freddy's girlfriend's parents' house. Need a nap. *Hugz*

21:15
Ah, this boy's gone and got himself a Guinness! .. Need it to soothe the pain from your absence.

22:23
Fucksocks, this sucks teh bollicks! Is prolly more than half an hour before I get there and I need to take a piss like a lama's ass. LuvU

22:58
Not to worry. There were many hedges by the platform. And people standing behind me on the opposite side. Hehe. *Hugz*

23:52
Yup. Having fun on the countryside ... I'm gonna get pissed

01:34
Out to where?

02:59
Sending my regards back from a lighthouse in Kristiansund. We're talking about tunnels, I think. *kiss*

04:02
Drinking gin here with F&M and have recently concluded a discussion on the dangers of dating with one miss Anita. I'm seeing double.

04:35
Nachspiel at our place.

04:58
How do I make a sandwhich?

05:21
The music isnt loud! I haven'theardany complaitnz!

18:13 (Sunday evening)
There are people from Blue Cross! outside the dorr and they want my money. I don't have any. Please make them go away, I'm too hung over to help the alcoholics.

19:23
There's toothpaste stuck in my beard... I miss u

21:05
Very poorly. Only TV and cheese doodles cya

22:20
V scary thing about haunted house in Taiwan on Discovery Lifestyle. There's this crazy Japanese woman who is DEAD. Watching Animal planet atm, MonkeyWorld. Monkeyworld manager is also DEAD now, from cancer. V sad. But the monkeys are happy.

23:01
I'm certain there's a crazy Japanese DEAD woman in teh bathroom. I can hear her hustle about. Just now I thought I saw her in the corner of my eye, just for a split second. She was very dead, and had two of those rollaboard luggage cases with wheels. Passing over I guess, through our bathroom. I'm not going into that bathroom.

00:15
Do you have any painkillers? I've got plenty pain to kill.

02:10
I can't sleep after those pain killers. Animal Planet all-nighter it is! How's work? *hugs*

Something like a month ago my dearly beloved Nokia N95 was stolen from my bare hands. Jaime wrote:

Maybe it's time to move somewhere where you're not mugged every other day. Maybe you should try New York, o Washington D.C. or Los Angeles. Good grief, I thought Norway was this utopia. Yer killing my fantasy.

You should never make the mistake of equating Oslo with Norway, like this: Oslo = Norway. It's a mathematical error. There are 4.5 million people in Norway and only about .5 of them live in Oslo. The rest of Norway really is utopia. If you like the great outdoors, moose and the absence of Other People. As for Oslo, it has a pretty glum image in terms of violent crime and poverty. Come to Oslo Airport any day, and arriving at the central station the first thing you'll see of one of the richest countries in the world (per capita) are homeless, beggars and junkies.

Mike wrote:

How did that happen -- mugged AGAIN???

Well, allow me to answer that for you Mike.



If you consider the satellite image above (click for Google map), the big sort of white-dotted building is the Munch museum carrying the finest painted art in and from Norway. Across the road on the right hand side you can see a stretch of grey stone going upwards from the crossway, which is the cobblestone sidewalk abruptly ending in what is the Munch museum bus stop if you're going west on route 20. It's very hard to see but it's there underneath the red dot.

That's where I was standing waiting for the 20:15 bus westwards on the eve of August 28th. I was heading west for food and female company, I was pretty hungry and in my hand was my entrusted & beloved Nokia N95. I was playing Snakes, or whatever the name is. Normally I wouldn't but that day I was. Anyway. Three guys, let's call them Huey, Dewey and Louie, came up to the bus stop. Consider this illustration:



I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: «Holy shit, Sigg3! You should just give up the blogging business and start making cartoons about these duck-like characters instead! You could build an evil cartoon empire and be a millionaire!» All true, except that I didn't draw the illustration. It's an already established comic, albeit underground and infamous. I just added a talking bubble to it and some text. Poorly, at that. And for those of us who know the comic, we can tell you that Huey, Dewey and Louie wouldn't say anything like that. They'd be more like: «Let's gut the bastard and piss on his corpse!»

But I digress.

Huey, Dewey and Louie approached the bus stop, passed me and looked at the timetable just to my right. Then Huey and Dewey seemingly continued into the park, but really just circled the bush behind the stop (Huey = 2 and Dewey = all black):



Then Louie (obj 1 fig 3) asked me whether I knew what time it was. What a hassle, almost reaching my all-time high score in snakes! I sighed.
"Yeah," I said, but at the instant I looked up he'd already snatched the phone from my hands and was running around the corner! (see black arrows)
It took me two moments to realize what had just happened. 'Seriously? What the fudge happened just now?' Because a gentleman such as myself would never lose temper and let his tongue spill vile words from hell. Fuck no. Then I headed after him. After all, it was sunny and bright, there were people in the park, so what's the worse that could happen? There are no rules for situations like these.

I caught Louie sitting in the bushes just around the corner, and after a bit I talked him out of the bush. His eyes were twitching. Fear? Tension? Speed? Hard to tell really. He wasn't making any sense, saying that it wasn't him that had taken the phone having just run away from me; but he emptied his pockets right there to show me that he didn't have it. At the same time one of his cohorts, number 2 in the diagram, was standing eerily close on my left side. This is known as the threatening pose, to impose either peace and quiet to the scene or an extra hand if I would turn violent. Because of this I didn't. I leaped back to the bus stop to see the lookout, Dewey, pass the road. Naturally it was he who had the phone now, and was furthest away from the scene of the crime. Huey and Louie hurried across the road.
"You CHEEKY BASTARDS!" I yelled, not knowing the post-mugged ethiquette per se.

Instinctively, Louie turned around and shouted something about the thieves running in the opposite direction. Right. At this point though, the bus was arriving, and since there weren't any other people on the front side of the Munch museum the battle was lost. Believe me, you don't want to follow a gang of hustlers down there without a considerable crowd of civilians backing you up at least as witnesses. And that's the last I've seen of them. You may only wonder what they're up to next.



Or maybe I'm being too harsh.. what they knew perfectly well was that I wasn't going to go up against them in the rather secluded area in front of the museum. And they probably knew that I was insured, exhausted, and that I've got have plenty of backups of whatever's on the phone. And they probably knew that it was worth losing rather than getting beat up to the death. And there's no end to what these guys knew. What they didn't know was that I carried 45,000 NOK worth of laptop equipment in the backpack...
Still I'm baffled thinking about it, how cheeky some people are. Are there no honor amongst thieves any longer? For christ's sake, I was at the bonus level!

Epilogue:
I received gratification from the insurance company and I am now legally entitled to obtain a new N95 at the net sum of 300 NOK (versus 5K for a new one). Now I just have to get my ass down to the teleshop. In the meanwhile I am using my weary Siemens MC60, which I think is the first ever artificial intelligence with brain tumor and split personalities. I also received a hefty telephone bill with 4 calls done by the boys to Pakistan, Gambia and Denmark. Lol.

Client: When's the new machine coming?
Sigg3: You know as much as I do about the ETA
Client: But can't you make them ship it right now?!
Sigg3: My hands are tied..
Client: I'm gonna go to the bosses and whine about it
Sigg3: ..to restrain me from physically manifesting my rage

And later, another VERY angry client

Client: OMG! THERE'S BEEN TWO MONTHS SINCE the client STARTED HERE AND THERE'S STILL NO NEW COMPUTER IN the OFFICE!!
Sigg3: Yes. Largely because the client chose a computer not even in the market yet.
Client: OMG! the client IS A VERY IMPORTANT PERSON AND BECAUSE I ASPIRE TO ONE DAY JOIN THE RANKS OF STUCKUP I NEED TO SATISFY the client's UNREALISTIC DEMANDS. SIGG3! You Must Do something about this right away! I'm So Angry! THIS WON'T DO AT ALL!
Sigg3: I can see why you're mad. It must really hurt to have that silver spoon stuck so far up your ass.

People get fired all the time for writing what they think... Sometimes it's worth it.

Dr. Pauly is back with another great issue of the only e-zine you'll ever need:

Thanks again for wasting your precious time with Truckin'. This month's issue features veteran Truckin' writers including the legendary Johnny Hughes with another Texas tale. Dusty Rhodes and John Hartness both make triumphant returns to the Truckin' roster. Betty After Dark will whip you in a deviant frenzy with her latest sultry tale. And I shared a new piece of fiction called Maisy Wednesday.

Maisy Wednesday by Paul McGuire
She always wore bright lipstick which brought out a little gleam in her lips. She frequently smiled, but never initiated any sort of conversation...

Happy Anniversary by John 'Falstaff' Hartness
As we stood outside the courthouse in our newly wedded bliss (which also somewhat resembled the look of people who have just survived a tornado, as it happened much faster than we expected) we decided that since Suzy didn't have to be at work for another couple of hours, we'd go have lunch. So we scraped together a few bucks and trundled over to a nearby McDonald's...

A Lock of Bonnie Parker's Hair by Johnny Hughes
They was real famous and in the newspapers and all robbing them banks, when banks were unpopular. I asked Bonnie for something to remember her by. We didn't have a pencil for an autograph. She pulled this little pair of scissors out of her purse and gave me this... a lock of her hair...

Whiskey Kisses by Betty After Dark
Held apart by distance and circumstance, brought together in soft voices, the pieces of who we are fill the room with every drink we pour. The gaps in our lives slowly closing as the light from the window crept into the room. There was something unavoidable that connected us, but the details were never as clear as they were this night....

What I Knew? by Dusty Rhodes
Just walk up and ask her you idiot... You've been friends for four years... she doesn't have a date and either do you... Quit being a pussy and ask her... Christ dude... what are you nervous about...

Some of you may have been picking up on my infrequent references to one miss Lady C, and I think it will suffice to say that she's my girlfriend. Officially And that she's not inflatable. Or catatonic. She's just awesome. One night after having watched a zombie movie with me, she dreamed that I had become one of the undead and that she had to beat me to death with my own, torn-off arm.
She woke me up just to tell me.

And today I'm meeting her parents. That is to say, I've already met both of them at separate occasions, and I've already slagged one of them off to the internets. (Read: 120 Minutes in Sodom). But today is the meet-the-parents dinner. Just after work. "Be natural", C told me. I'll be going as a cactus.

I got a BSOD in Windows Vista today, and Vista politely asked me whether I wanted Vista to check what the problem was and provide me with any solutions. I clicked yes, and after some thorough afterthought it presented me with the answer:

This problem was caused by Windows Vista, which was created by Microsoft, Inc.
Microsoft, Inc. is aware of the problem and working as quickly as possible to make a solution available.

What do you mean? It's right here: www.linux.org

Keep away from children. If swallowed, promptly see a doctor.

I can see it 'for me very eyes..

- Doctor! Doctor! My 4 year old swallowed my 16GB SONY USB Flash drive!
- Ah, you mean the 16GJ USB Flash drive!
- Uh, I'm not sure.. Er. What?
- It's a medical expression, son. We the scholars choose J for GB.
- Right.. But my kid!
- Absolutely. So tell me about this disk. Was it in use at the time?
- Connected to a 15.4" laptop while being swallowed? No.
- What file system was on it?
- What difference does it make?
- It makes A WHOLE LOT OF DIFFERENCE! We need to know whether the acutely ill patient, your son, swallowed highly fragmented files below the FAT32 file size limitation OR if he's now digesting a 14 gig elephant with unknown alternate datastreams and severely abused META data.
- I guess it was FAT32..
- You usually guess when somebody's life's on the line..?
- It was the default filesystem! How should I know?
- Ah, the good ol' FAT32..
- I guess
- You've got nothing to worry about. Your son's gonna be absolutely fine. If you haven't used it much the file size limitation will make sure that the pieces go through the intestines as usual, and if there are larger files on it, chances are it's going to be so fragmented that the white blood cells will easily be able to pick up the pieces and it'll all go away through perspiration.
- But his face is blue!
- Well, that would be the suffocation
- Is it dangerous?
- It might lead to some extra fragmentation but apart from that..nothing to worry about
- And my son?!
- Just another minute now, and it'll all go away

Sometimes at work I'll stumble over some old, unknown hardware just lying around on the floor in the basement. Sometimes it looks shiny, and I want to have it. Today I found a PowerExec 4/25SL from AST Research Inc. The ari-service.com website has a lot of great information about these ancient systems, that were made to compete with IBM's machinery in the early 90s, and whose demise was caused by relying wholly upon self-manufactured components instead of following the OEM standardization we came to know as the PC.

Here's a tell-tale illustration of the chassis. It's fitted with a Norwegian/Arabic keyboard combo and a 2.5 Inch IDE Hard Drive at a full 200 MB diskspace so you can see why I'm so excited (it doesn't have LBA so you can forget about replacing it). Is it Y2K compliant? "Enter the date at the DOS prompt and then reboot the computer." Apparently this little baby was assembled in Mexico, and sports a whopping 4MB of RAM. I'm gonna fit it with Damn Small Linux and pitch it up against the old IBM laptop from 93 that I've got as a dust-collector in the back of my office. I'm not gonna do any other distros, unless they come in a friendly amount of floppies..