On my thirty-third birthday I want to quit my job. Not because I hate it or that it is a cesspool of unbearable personal politics, it is actually a great place to work. No I want to quit because I’m just tired of working the 8-5 grind. So I bought myself a cheap gift this morning after filling up the car with gas: a Powerball ticket.
Powerball is up to $205 million and the lump sum payment is $100 million and after the tax man takes his share that leaves about $40 million. I would take that remainder and invest it and live off a conservative return of 2.5% or approximately $400k after taxes. Just enough to be comfortable.
Never would I work again. Rather, I would go back to school and pursue my doctorate, maybe studying the intersection of technology and social groups with a focus on small group theory. The remainder of my time I would spend with my daughter as she grows up.
At the very least that dollar was well spent on day dreams.
It seems that I am the number three hit for Breast Feed Porn. Seriously. The people who are searching for this stuff–lactation fetishists or whatever–need to get another thing. The fact you are trying to spank it to my baby’s dinner is just nasty, and not Ms. Jackson nasty either.
Surprisingly, I am still able to pick up a book and read but that could be due to the small fact that Gabby is still only a couple of weeks old.
A couple of nights ago I knocked back the last book in the Wheel of Time series and am in the process of noshing on the prequel novel, New Spring. While I found the books to be good, campy, high-fantasy fun–nothing too serious, just solid escapism–after spending a year in the world of swords and sorcery (some 9,000 pages!) I’m thinking a change of pace and setting is in order.
Here’s four that I’m thinking of tackling:
Where should I start? Dystopia or whaling? Interstellar colonization or positronic mysteries?
Help!
It was a quick walk. We were gone no more that ten minutes when upon our return we found these all neatly wrapped like a dash of Christmas joy nestled in January.
This person or persons are at once generous and sneaky.
The Norwich Bulletin reports that a substitute teacher has been found guilty in Norwich porn case and with her sentencing looming in March she could face upwards of 40 years in jail but there is a twist to the story.
When the facts of the case are laid out it looks to be a blizzard of incompetence ranging from the school’s IT staff, shoddy forensic police work, questionable judicial proceedings, and a the ribbon that ties it all together is one of Redmond’s flagship products. SunbeltBLOG worries about the notion of doing actual hard time for a spyware infection. A frightening though indeed.
Reading the articles I find myself question the capabilities of the police investigators and their apparent lack of understanding of how spyware operates. From another Norwich Bulletin article:
Norwich Police Det. Mark Lounsbury, who investigates computer crimes, said there was evidence that someone had directly accessed several sexually-oriented sites by clicking on a link.
Ok. Prove that to me. Do you have photographic or video evidence? Because guess what Det. Lounsbury, popup generators are designed to act like a human click-through and this is not to mention that there are no means to differentiate between a bot click or a human click. Now you might say, “But she had to install the software, therefore she must have visited those sites!” Wrong again. Nearly all Microsoft OSes log in as root by default and one of the charming aspects of this is that it allows for the surreptitious installation of software. In other words using Internet Explorer as root will allow sites to install software without your knowledge or consent, wonderful technologies like ActiveX facilitate this activity. The defense’s examination of the facts pointed to a hairstyling website as the source of the infection.
All this begs the question of what the lazy ass Norwich school IT staff was up to before, during, and after this incident. If I were Amero I would be giving serious consideration to a civil suit against the town and possibly the state. It is their responsibility to secure the PCs and the network, not the teachers, and you can scream all you want that she should have unplugged the PC but the fact still remains that shitty IT staff plus a crap OS is a disaster waiting to happen. Should she do time for the incompetence of others?
My $0.02 in closing: Don’t trust the cops and get yourself a secure OS.
There hasn’t been much time in the past couple of weeks for me to write, let alone really think about the birth of our daughter and the subsequent changes to our lives. Hectic, confusing, sometimes traumatic, and mostly filled with beautiful moments would make for a passable summary. The dull cloud of shock is beginning to wear off and the weight of our new life is making itself felt.
I am still thinking about the events leading up to and tumbling after the birth of our daughter. Six days in the hospital is a long time and a week plus days with only fragments of sleep to cover oneself leaves you in a sort of psychotic waking state. There are experiences that still need to be unraveled and examined, others that should be filed away and not looked at for months maybe years, and still some that should be cherished and clung to like a life preserver in tumultuous, midnight darkened seas.
Our daughter is exerting a gravity neither of us has ever experienced, pulling us in closer to her and each other; exposing our fears, weaknesses, strengths, and joys with each revolution of the sun. We love her, more than anything before and possibly anything after her but for now she has rendered me inarticulate.
