Month: January 2005
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I watched a program last night called "Jump London". It probably first aired late last year or just after the New Year. It's about a new extreme sport known in its founding language, French, as "parkour". In English, a translation of "free running" seems to be catching on. The essence of free running is mastering a discovered array of urban obstacles such as fences, barricades, walls, roofs, gaps between buildings, etc., while running/leaping/jumping but never stopping. "Never Backwards" is their motto and gracefulness of movement in performing spectacular urban aerobatics is their ideal. So the idea is to transverse the urban landscape, often by rooftops, with a constant flow of running motion and stopping for nothing - but finding a way, even in the most challenging circumstances - in the act. Someone called it the art of cat burglary without the larceny. Heh. True free runners, however, disdain that comparison and embrace the philosophy of martial arts, if not the taoistically mystical.
The website urbanfreeflow best describes the sport and its history.
A video of the sport featuring one of its founders, Frenchman David Belle, can be found here.
I haven't seen any free runners live in my parts yet. (Have you?) I wonder (hrmm...) if I should be the first.
Yeah, I'd probably kill myself. And, no, it wouldn't go over big for me to be vaulting vaults and scaling mausoleums in Dreamland (Lake View Cemetery) where I typically run.
Still... just to be able to call myself a "traceur" (free runner) and lose myself in "the flow".
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Ready for the weekend's winterland of wonders...
There’s chapstick on my lips (I just put it there), although my lips are not chapped. Doesn’t that make it anti-chapstick?
We say that rock salt melts ice. Well, the ice melts the rock salt, too. If rock salt were more of a nuisance than ice, we’d buy ice and throw it on the salt to get rid of it.
I hold the record for making the littlest snowman: three flakes stacked atop one another.
I find it much easier and safer to run on ice than walk on it. Unless I have to make a sudden turn in direction.
Ice is not just rock-hard. It IS a rock. Anything that forms crystals below its melting point is a mineral and if it aggregates into a solid mass, it is a rock in my book. “On the rocks’ is not just a figure of speech. It is the essence of literality. Hailstones anybody? Duh.
Snow crystals are really dirt particles dressed up in ice. Next time you put on a pretty dress, think of a snow crystal.
There’s an old windchill and a new windchill index. Yet their use is still mixed and you can’t always be sure which one is being referenced. If you know your air temperature and the wind speed, you can go here to compare the two. The old one, used by the National Weather Service until 2001 measured the impact of chilled wind on freezing water, not human bodies. It was much ‘chillier’ than the current one (Steadman index) which measures effects of chill on the human body. Hey, things are heating up. Must be the greenhouse effect.
If it’s snowing harder than you can dig yourself out of, you’re being anastrophically buried (a term from geobiology that I used as a student while writing a reviewed and published scientific paper*). So if you look outside and feel overwhelmed by a blizzard, scream “It’s an anastrophe!”
If you go outside in a blizzard, have a death wish, and you see some fool running around a cemetery like he’s Attila the Hun storming
*Sediment mixing by Lampsilis radiata siliquoidea
(Mollusca) from western
Lakes Research, 5, 105-111
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I’ve a feeling a whole lot of you aren't going to like me much after I reveal a certain something about myself. In fact, some of you may end up saying: “If he cared about us even a little, he would have just kept it to himself.”
Right.
Do I care?
No, I’ve never been an actual assassin. Never took that controlled breath—then released, knowing that my steady aim was correlative with someone’s last breath.
It’s worse than that.
I walk fast.
Chances are, I walk faster, much faster than you.
Chances are, if you were walking ahead of me on a sidewalk , you’d sense me catching up from behind and passing you up. And I would likely, given the rule of street non-etiquette in a burgeoning metropolis, not even acknowledge you.
Truth is, I probably walk faster than most people can jog. If they did. Which they don’t.
Okay. There it is. Ready-set?
Go. -
This Romanesque bridge spans Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard (once known as Liberty Boulevard) in Rockerfeller Park, Cleveland.
Below, a historic postcard of another bridge from the same locale.
Yesterday:
I ran in a Dreamland (cemetery) snowstorm.
finished wallpapering a room.
shoveled snow from 1500 sq ft. (my driveway and walks) twice.
took the two photos above.
published a security script on Chocolate that requires casual surfers to log into xanga before viewing your site.
drained the air from the water pipes that was rattling the plumbing when the toilet was flushed (sounded like a tornado).
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Yeah, the xangagods pulled the plug on 'fuck'. And it wasn't even pornographic. Nor did they email me an explanation. For not at least conversing with me, I say: f*** them. Well, enough of that.
In memoriam...#1 Featured, 342 props, 196 comments:
fuck turned out to be too much for xanga. Makes me wonder if I couldn't be spending the rest of my blogging energy somewhere else better, too.
update: I just sent an email to xanga on this...
I'll be brief. 'fuck' was my site. You shut it down at noon EST on Saturday. No explanation of shutdown was provided in the sitemessage (now there in its place), nor have i been provided the courtesy by you by email of an explanation.
A lot of my well-established readers (going back to when you sponsored the spamming Bianca) are pissed. They see your action as censorship. Frankly, I do, too.
Would you care to provide an explanation so that I can inform my readers?
Thanks.
notforprophet
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I need to doing something wicked with xanga. Maybe I can screw with fuck ...
But what to do? What to do?
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It’s 65 F. out now. Hey, we’re talking mid-winter in
Just after sunset, post-run, and perfectly comfortable. (and I’m sweating, too—too much information?!)
Speaking of displays…
xTracker Advisory:
If you use the growingly popular xTracker (xanga logger), be aware that the supposed ‘private module’ display in your xanga of the ‘last visitors’ is NOT private.
Proof of concept:
I established an xTracker for an alias named ‘chocolate’. On the xTracker Settings page, I made the display module ‘private’ only to chocolate. That is, if I’m logged in as chocolate, I am supposed to see my last 10 or 20 or whatever number (up to 99) of xanga visitors in a private left-sided module on my xanga, but the rest of you aren’t. But, in actuality, anyone can see chocolate's supposedly private information here:
http://www.bloggary.com/xtracker.php?xUser=chocolate
(hint: click on chocolate first. Notice that there's no xTracker module display of 'last visitors' on the left-hand side. Now click the link above to see your xanga-self as chocolate sees it in her private custom module when logged on to her private page)
If you have an xTracker with a private module display, plug your xTracker name in the line above and you’ll see that it, too, isn’t private, after all.
But beyond that, xTracker admits to being hacked constantly. Besides thus being unreliable, there’s a chance that some hacker could break in and feed up malicious stuff to your xTracker module. Think of it this way: Your blog is
So, if you’re going to use xTracker, at least disable the xTracker Custom Module that plugs into your xanga page and log into it only directly to view your logs.
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The missing cosmic link has been found. Revealed in news stories yesterday. “Smoking-gun” proof that the speculated non-homogenous pattern of galaxy dispersion throughout the cosmos macrocosmically replicates the microcosm of subatomic irregularities at the birth of our universe 14 billion years ago has been provided by two separate research teams.
Moreover they have determined that only 18% of all the matter in the cosmos is visible (baryonic). The rest (82%) is the undetermined substance called dark matter (non-baryonic). And…
--ScienceDaily.com
Let’s see: all matter is only 20% of “stuff” in the cosmos and what we normally have considered “the Universe” (visible ‘stuff”) is just 18% of that, or a mere 3.6% of Everything!
Funny thing is, the Dark Side isn’t appealing to us or trying to attract us, but repelling us. It’s dissing us like a totally undesired wooer. I’m offended. What makes it think it’s better than us, anyway?
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It's not only what you see with your eyes that matters.
But what you see that shouldn't be there.
And what you don't see that should be there.Overlap the three like transparencies into one visionary template.
And interpret the composite from the essentialness of You.Make adamant what you picture. Then act upon that vision.
Not only does your reality, so demanded, depend upon your prowess.
Mine, in being part of yours, does, too. I'm feeling so needy and in total want of a cosmic readjustment. So do what you need to do. And I, co-immediately, pledge so too.The world awaits the multisensoriness of us. And I anticipate you.
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Earlier post today was 3 years old. Was lazy this morning. Needed to visit Dreamland and run some miles, ponder unquantifiable ineffabilities...
marshall energy. notice: Winter snowballs.
yet not focused enough to stay focused: Inadvertant sky shot while running.
who dares stalk the dead?
drive-thru past King Tut's tomb.
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Let's give John et.al. at Xanga HQ some credit...
If you check the Xanga 'Join' page now, you'll notice it requires human verification in the form of a 'captcha'. This will prevent programs like the holiday-spawned GNAA trollbot auto-signup from flooding Xanga with registrations of malicious intent.
By the way, ALL of the previous thousands of auto-accounts that GNAA created to comment-spam us had a non-varying password of '123456'. heh. And many, many of those are still 'active' with the default password...
for example:
afghanistan_needs_EXTRAMARITAL
american_belies_walker7162
ballocks_slashdot_iraqi7352
Chicago_gay_x_emo_x9522
gay_obsessed_mexican8428
horny_president_cool8667
lover_american_anal6542
Over there, a self-proclaimed GNAA operative was disgruntled because no one, including Xanga, was giving them much credit. um...here was my response:
I’m up set to see you did not give us at the GNAA any credit to our work…this is most displeasing…
Comment by dcom — 1/5/2005 @ 10:49 am
GNAA calls this “work"? heh. They are so vain. They live for vanity. If there were both an al Qaeda operative and a GNAA trash-holer hanging from branches off the edge of a cliff, it would be an amusing decision which branch to break first.
Comment by notforprophet — 1/7/2005 @ 11:24 am
I would advise the idiots who associate with GNAA and such other worthless dung-mongering confederacies to get lives. Except they wouldn't know what to do with them.
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Do you think you can just leave any comment you want on my site?
Do you think you can just come here and say anything imaginable and have it post?
Well, you're absolutely wrong and I'm 100% sure of it.
Yes, you can say 'fuck you' or 'you totally suck' and probably get away with it. At least until I read it, delete it, and totally block your ass.
But you can't leave any permanent comment whatsoever if you mention or leave the acronym GNAA (or gnaa ) in the comment box. It will seem to post, alright. But if you refresh the page, it will have disappeared. Like you never existed. Because, in that case on Xanga , you don't.
Want an explanation? What? Do you think I'm the Answer-Man? -
Well, I wasn't going to say anything.
But now that it's 'out' and growingly topical in the geek community, why should Xangans be the last to know?
We were annoyed by the holiday troll-botting that baited us with racist/sexist comments. But apparently, some or all of that botting was also engineered to successfully deliver a distributed denial of service attack (DDos) to Slashdot.com over the holidays.
And apparently that was just a 'proof of concept'. Meaning to the devious: "Attention all K-Mart hackers: this way to the Xanga door and key aisle."
There's also a 'full disclosure' available on the internet that provides a code to steal xanga cookies (passwords) and suggests that the exploits described above can be employed to harvest thousands of our passwords per hour.
My advice (while we wait for Xanga to secure its code and processes): if you get hit up by what appears to be random hate/racist/sexist comments (even just one) and you want to check out the offending source xanga blog (a totally natural response on your part), either a) log out of your xanga account and visit the site looking like a non-xangan, or b) subscribe to a relatively inexpensive anonymizer service like megaproxy.com and do your blogging under the cloak of stealth.
(btw, I hate writing these kinds of posts. It's too much like the work I do as an information security specialist.)
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Let's make natural disasters, not war.
We name hurricanes after people, why can't we name PHAs (potentially hazardous asteroids) after figures in Revelation? Asteroid 666. Asteroid Omega. Asteroid Antichrist. And then we can sit back and make book on which player in the astral revelational pantheon will be the first to come through.
And back to hurricanes...what's up with giving them names like "Shirley" and "Jimmy"? They are terribly potent and destructive phenomena that deserve concomitant Power Names from us. Hurricane Darth. Hurricane Trickster. Hurricane Ripper. However, Hurricane Rip-You-A-New-Asshole may be a little overboard.
And why are we calling this recent natural disaster just plain old "Tsunami"? As if this, 'our tsunami', is the only one worthy of the name "Tsunami"? That's as self-centric as would be calling the Sun 'Star' and the rest of those things we never really notice anymore 'dim lights in the night sky'. Call it the 'Fuck-It Tsunami' (after Phuket) or 'Pre-Apocalypse Tsunami I' or something. Come on.
And we should also give consideration to a naming convention for the approaching eruption of super-volcanoes (like
Damn it, the original attribution of names to the nameless animals gave Adam and Eve dominion over the Earth. (Your pet has a name, doesn’t it? And you probably thus master it.) We, as a world, are losing this dominion-grip in modern times because we've stopped doing what we do best: giving appropriate names to things! Clearly, the major challenge to us of our times is to confer Names of Power and Potency to modern cataclysmic stuff in order to regain the necessary upper iron-hand. -
I was 'on the job' today wallpapering a vacant house. I had my mobile webcam trained on me, more or less. It recorded me working...and drinking beer, working...and drinking beer, working...and drinking beer. Hey, if you missed it, I'll be back tomorrow. If you can't wait, then get your own six pack.
So while my mobile webcam is idle, some New Year scapes for your viewing diversion...
~city snowcone: crunchy snow covered with gravel topping~
~the big pond swoosh~
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